Greetings everyone, we’ve had a great launch week for CardLife but we’re still seeing players report lag in both single player and multiplayer modes. The good news is that we have started preparations to fix the lag this week and progress is going well.
Cloud-Based Servers
Currently in-game even if you are hosting a private server or Single Player game, your server or client needs to check in with a service we use called Photon to verify the actions you’re doing on a server. This Photon server is situated Amazon Web Services data centre in Dublin, Ireland.
Obviously, this can cause big lag spikes as not everyone is located in Europe. Over the past 4 days we’ve had players from almost every country on the planet playing CardLife which while very exciting, has led to poor network performance the further away you are from our office. We are going to fix that by moving to a cloud-based Photon solution which automatically routes all traffic to the nearest server to you with server locations on every major continent on the planet. This will mean that even if you’re playing in North America, Russia, Africa, Asia or Oceanic regions you will not suffer the crippling lag that some players have reported to us during Single Player and host Multiplayer servers.
To put this more simply, cloud-based servers will improve base level network performance for Single Player and Hosted Multiplayer servers. This solution is set to go live towards the end of next week, pending successful tests. So that’s big network fix number 1, sorted.
Connecting via Proxy
Big network fix number 2 is related to players failing to connect to servers. We’ve had over 110 Steam Reviews since we launched on Tuesday and a considerable percentage of those report that they can’t connect to servers or even see a server list. We believe this problem is related to player location and some territories failing to connect to our Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers. We are currently implementing a solution to this which involves players being routed to a separate server provider automatically if you fail to connect to AWS. We’re currently trialling this solution with some members of the community and if you are from Russian territories and would like to help us with these tests, please send a ticket to our support team (https://support.freejamgames.com/hc/en-us) and we’ll send you more instructions on how you can assist.
Again if all those things line up and work correctly we will be adding that to the CardLife server infrastructure next week.
Offline Single Player Mode
Additionally as confirmed in a blog post earlier this week, we are currently working on implementing a 100% offline Single Player mode to CardLife. This will minimise lag completely when you play as the actions you do in-game will be 100% resolved by your client. Many of you have requested this option in CardLife and we’re happy to report that we’ll be looking to deliver it by the end of the month if development goes well.
We want to say a big thank you to all those who are being patient with us while we resolve the kinks in our server infrastructure. Rest assured we are working on getting everyone who has purchased CardLife playing as soon as we can.