Too many reloads

[LichKing]

The game window reloads much more often than before. Sometimes it says 'the client lost connection etc', but until I press 'ok' it doesn't reload, and often I just have to wait a couple of seconds, after that the connection is reestablished and the game goes on without need of reloading. But many times it reloads the page without prompting anything, often after I won a battle, conquered a town or some gold site. I don't think these reloads are necessary, they really slow down everything if you (like me) don't have a very good connection.
It also happens often after I change the fight order.

[LPhillips]

I don't know if this is related, and I don't know what has changed. But as of today, the Warbarons game client causes Firefox to eat around 50% of my CPU. It's unplayable for me now.

[SnotlinG]

LichKing,
Let me know the gamename of some game where you think this is happening alot, and I will have a look.
It could be it is just some problems with your connection, but then we want it to work as smoothly as possible for bad connections also, so maybe we can optimize some code or so.

LPhilips,
I dont think anything has been changed on the site. Our developmentwork happens in a diffrent subdirectory so it should not affect the current games. Do you still have the CPU problem? (Maybe its a water intense map? We know the water animation unfortunately takes a bit of cpu)

[KGB]

LPhillips,

The 50% CPU usage was the norm for me before the latest Beta. It all had to do with unfogging the map making the browser slower and slower. Hitting 'refresh' regularly helped me. Are you by chance playing a Pre-Beta5 game?

There was also a big Firefox update over the weekend that you might have gotten that maybe is causing the problem for you? I also find if you reduce the browser size (if you have a large monitor screen) it can help reduce load since there is less animation to draw on water maps.

KGB

[LichKing]

Probably the frequent reloads happened also before and I didn't notice them, because my connection was even worse before, so I blamed the connection. Anyway, especially after battles (almost always after a hero gains a level) and changes of the fight order, there are lots of reloads that maybe aren't necessary (unless they have some purpose I'm not aware of).

[KGB]

Changes to the fight order are expensive. That's because potentially you have to update every stack on the map with a new icon (if the top unit changed when the order changed). I suspect the game just reloads all the stacks back to the browser so it can redraw them all regardless of whether its needed or not. Even with a fast connection I notice it can take a second or two for the redraw to occur though my CPU is below average these days.

After battles/conquering a city/hero level up require some loading from the server (to display the right info in the menu) but shouldn't need an entire map reload like Fight Ordering would.

KGB

[LichKing]

But these reloads don't happen always, just often. Sometimes I change the fight order with no reload, same for battles.

SnotlinG, it happens in all games, also in a beta4 game still in progress, so it's not something new. I could try to change browser, maybe something changes.

[KGB]

Out of curiosity I just ran WireShark then did the following (using Firefox):

1) Changed fight order with nothing selected
2) Changed fight order with a stack selected and changed order of 2 units that were present in that stack
3) Changed fight order with a stack selected and changed the top unit (so the icon had to change).

In all 3 cases the amount of data exchanged with the server was exceptionally minimal (less than 10 packets of data).

Now this test was in a game on turn 2 so I don't exactly have a lot of men on the map that would cause a lot of redraws.

LichKing, do you have Wireshark installed (it's a free program)? Might be worth installing and running in the background and then when one of the 'reloads' happens you can look and see if the problem is a LOT of data arriving or just a small amount arriving that is coming from a busy server making or if it's simply a matter of whatever browser you have taking a long time to redraw the effects.

KGB

[LPhillips]

It was a resolution problem for me. Increase your browser resolution, triple the CPU usage. Still didn't bring Real Time Activity full into view anyway.

[LichKing]

It could be that the browser is the problem. It didn't happen with Chrome until now.