Developer Notes #15

In the latest release of Entropia Universe (15.15.7) a persistent issue related to lag and connectivity that had affected an increasing number of Entropia players was resolved. 

The Entropia community reported their experience of lag in support cases and on community forums. These reports helped our developers to pinpoint the causes of the problem within the many layers of IT-technology that constitutes the core of the Entropia Universe platform.

What makes Entropia stand out among other MMOs are, among many other things, the highly secure Real Cash Economy and its borderless server architecture that provides a seamless and immersive virtual universe. Events such as economic transactions should be visible to all affected participants instantaneously, no matter where they are located within Entropia Universe. 

For players within visible range of each other even more information needs to be shared. This includes the smallest things such as avatar movement, clothing or armor equipped by avatars or the firing of weapons. Some events such as creature attacks will also include calculations of varying complexity within various systems.

All game events that occur between Entropia Universe clients around the world and the Entropia Universe data centers are securely transmitted over the internet. To achieve a smooth and reliable Entropia Universe experience, all components in the client-internet connection-server chain must themselves perform smoothly and reliably.

When an unexpected and intermittent behavior such as lag begins to occur, developers need to examine when and where it started and then work to isolate the possible causes of the problem. In a complex environment such as Entropia Universe there are many layers of software that can be involved. Further, a number of services provided by 3rd parties such as Internet Service Providers can also be part of the experienced problem.

As both our datacenter engineers and developers worked through the layers of the infrastructure and software that could be contributing to the lag problem of the past few months, a number of issues were addressed in patches during the final months of 2017. We also measured the effect of those patches and received valuable feedback from community polls and support channels.

After weeks of hard work the developers found that changes to certain underlying parts of the server software dramatically decreased the incidence and severity of lag experiences. Extensive testing of the new software was performed over Christmas and New Years, and on January 5, 2018 a patch was ready for release.

The developers want to express their gratitude to all players who reported valuable information about their experience of the lag situation. While all at MindArk are dedicated to continually improving the Entropia Universe experience in the years to come the feedback from the people behind the avatars that essentially are the Entropia community are simply priceless.

If you still encounter lag-related issues please review the System Requirements and make sure that your computer and internet equipment have the latest updates. A router restart can also sometimes help with problems on your local network.

The Entropia Universe support team are always available at https://account.entropiauniverse.com/support-faq/contact/ if you need any further assistance or want to report an issue.