Knights and Merchants.net Forum

Through common notice I have seen my aged computer network disconnect upon loading the first long distance multiplayer game with players due to computer lag.

A workaround for r2736 is to first load any single player map or local server multiplayer map alone and cancel the game after the map loads before taking part in a long distance game on one of the listed servers with other players. I have noticed that during a session of the game existing in RAM after doing this prepares the next game against other players for quicker loads. Let me know how this works.

It's not to do with the network, the problem is loading sprites (images). All of the market sprites we added are stored as pngs in the current release, which are slow to load. Since then we have packed these sprites into our own custom format to make them load quickly, so you won't have this problem in the next release.

The reason it disconnects you from multiplayer games if loading takes too long is because the client doesn't respond to the server while it is busy loading, and the server assumes you have timed out if loading takes a while on your computer. Eventually we could make loading happen in a different thread to networking so the can both happen at once, but that's a lot of work.

Thanks for elaborating Lewin, but do you think doing that for now until the next release would speed a second map load in one session of gaming? (at least for those experiencing dc's?)

@Garnu_Thorn:
Your solution is good and it is the only one until next version of Remake is released. Once you start a map, all sprites are kept in memory, so next game will launch significantly faster, but you can't close program. When you close Remake, memory will be freed and on next startup everything will be loaded again.