Lag-o-Meter

Hey,

I think it would be useful to have a function or peripheral to get the current frame rate of the game, so we can switch large, lag producing machines (scrap-production for mass fabricator, giant turtle swarm, water mill power plant etc) off if the game lags too much.

Syntax could be like

.getFrameRate() -- would return the frame rate as a number

sry if its bad english, its not my native language.

cant you just press "F3" and see the current FPS?

Definitely not. Makes no sense from the context of the game world.

redeye83, on 21 January 2013 - 04:54 AM said:

cant you just press "F3" and see the current FPS?

I can, but a computer can't, so i would have switch it off manually, and traveling a long distance or even between dimensions (i have a solar power plant in a bright mystcraft dimension) with lag is a pain.

edit: maybe you didn't understand waht i meant, so here's an example script:

-- startup file on a computer far from your base
rs.setOutput("back", true) -- switches machine (e.g. timer) on
while true do
if os.getFrameRate() < 30 then
  rs.setOutput("back", false) -- switches machine off again
end
sleep(60)
end

ah I didnt realise you wanted to due it auto (I feel stupid now lol)

Glotz659, on 21 January 2013 - 05:01 AM said:

redeye83, on 21 January 2013 - 04:54 AM said:

cant you just press "F3" and see the current FPS?

I can, but a computer can't, so i would have switch it off manually, and traveling a long distance or even between dimensions (i have a solar power plant in a bright mystcraft dimension) with lag is a pain.

edit: maybe you didn't understand waht i meant, so here's an example script:

-- startup file on a computer far from your base
rs.setOutput("back", true) -- switches machine (e.g. timer) on
while true do
if os.getFrameRate() < 30 then
  rs.setOutput("back", false) -- switches machine off again
end
sleep(60)
end

Again,

Cloudy, on 21 January 2013 - 04:57 AM said:

Definitely not. Makes no sense from the context of the game world.

The frame rate is client-side, the code is executed server-side, this wouldn't work very well on servers.

you can do it kind of btw using os.clock

Nah, not really - clock is only advanced on ticks too, and sleep works on ticks.

Cloudy, on 21 January 2013 - 08:05 AM said:

Nah, not really - clock is only advanced on ticks too, and sleep works on ticks.

Is a timer ticks? If not you could get a TPS working with clock and a timer.

you can measure how long it takes for the computer to go through your code with os.clock and sleep according to that surely?

Everything is based on ticks.

I had my suspicion that everything was based on ticks, which does shatter an idea I had.
Cloudy, how about the alarms, I take it they are 100% ticks also, since they use MC time which is incremented by a 20th of a second, each tick.

Well at least the game is fully synchronized, slow or fast, everything always gets the same amount of ticks.

I think the only luck beyond this would be http with a real world clock. Checking the time difference, if there is a slew of more than 40/50% you could shut down things.

Yes, alarms are based off ticks. Everything is based off ticks.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shs7VQhVvxA[/media]

Or, you can just take care to program things so that they yield until they are actually needed to do something, or even shut themselves off if they aren't in use.

And eventually you could use the HTTP api (if available) to compare ticks with elapsed time through a time server. This would only work properly over larger intervals I suppose.

Cloudy, on 21 January 2013 - 01:06 PM said:

Yes, alarms are based off ticks. Everything is based off ticks.

- video snip -

LOL!!! Nice…

Lister, as usual exercising less than the minimum safe hygienic discretion. "Hmm…everyone's dead, so I'll taste some of this white powder lying about."

Orwell's idea would work the best. It wouldn't be possible to compare two in-game times, since they're both advancing at the same rate (Eg. The computer could think 1 second has elapsed when it actually has been 2). I'm not great at explaining.

Off-topic-ish: How does the server calculate the TPS? Does it reference other machine times?

Zoinky, on 22 January 2013 - 07:56 PM said:

Orwell's idea would work the best. It wouldn't be possible to compare two in-game times, since they're both advancing at the same rate (Eg. The computer could think 1 second has elapsed when it actually has been 2). I'm not great at explaining.

Off-topic-ish: How does the server calculate the TPS? Does it reference other machine times?

Java code can easily access real and in-game time to compare them.