PSA: If you or your Friends Lag or have Connection issues. "-nosteam" is your Friend!
I am from time to time on Mobile Internet, because of reasons, so my connection ain't very "stable" at times.
I noticed on alot of games, that when I play them via Steam, and a Hostet by a Friend, they turn to be unplayable, when I am on mobile, and a lagfest. While I can play non Steam games even on the other side of the Globe without lag.Same happens on Zomboid, if I join via Steam my Ping jumps around from 95-700 and driving with my Buds is impossible and results in a disconnect. Some builds ago we could use the Non-Steam.bat and run the Server and Game this way. This fixed all my Problems.
The bat has been removed and running a Dedicated Server is a no go, because you can't import Characters from a Hostet Game to the Dedicated Server. Now I remembered that there was the -nosteam command on some games.We all put the -nosteam command into our Loading options, also the Host of the game, and now we can connect to the game without needing to Auth with Steam.The game runs smooth and Lagfree now, seems like if you use the Steam version everything gets routed to the Steam Servers, to grab some infos, first and then gets routed to the Game Server.
TL/DR
Use -nosteam in the Launchoptions as Gamehost and all Players to have a better Gaming experience without Lags and Stutters.
Edit: You can't connect via Steamfriends when using this. Just connect via the Browser by making a Favorite Server with the IP of the Gamehosts Server, usually you can rightclick on anyone on the Server and "Show Game Info", you can see the Ip there.
Posted Dec 29, 2021, 4:06 PM UTC · edited
I don’t see how it’d make a difference unless you turned off udp (tutn off tcp mode) in the severest.ini?
Steam just handles authentication and things like that. We’re not sending map or player data through it, afaik.
But it does, no Idea why. It fixed my problem so there is a reason. And it is not only with PZ but with other games aswell.
But to be clear this only is a Problem if I am on Mobile connection 20mbit/s . If I am at Home I have no Problem with my regular 1 gbit/s Internet.
But my Friend had the Problem from time that when we slept the time was 8.00 Am for the Host but 2.00 am for all the others. We slowly chatched back with him in time, and if we stood up while catching up we almost died of thirst.
This Problem is now also gone for both of us.
Just a note that 20mbps isn't the issue. 5mbps would be far far more than needed for Project Zomboid, or any game really.
The problem is that mobile data can have very unreliable data signals which have a lot more packet loss which can result in lag spikes and higher latency
Worked surprisingly well for me at ~1000ms ping and 1mbps, until we found out that I was causing the teleporting zombies for my buddies.
Pro-tip: the zombies chasing you are being handled by your client, so if you have 1 second latency maybe hang back a bit
Well the real problem seems to be in some cases just the amount of data, meaning quantity not size. If you want to move or Copy your Savegame or the map, those 40mb take alot of time to move even on a M.2 Raid. We are at 6430 Files on the Save and didn't even reach Winter.
So now the Steam servers or anything that is in the way between the Host and the Client will need to check hundreds to thoudends of packets per second depending on how fast you f.e. move through Louisville and in old times even ISP did that checking and you had to pay for Fast Path ( the Germans will remember ) to get a playable connection.
But only a certain amount can or will be checked per second. If you stay still with the Car every so often the Client would catch up, we tested this several times.
And as I mentioned already I can play Games on USA East while beeing from Europe with a 120-150ms Ping and everything is fine and most of the are Shooters.
This issue only happens on certain Steam games, I have the exact same Problem on Factorio. So we run it dedicated non Steam. On Warhammer Vermentide we have te issue that if a certain Player Hosts it, I cant play normaly, if the other one on a different ISP does it, it works.
I totally agree with you about multiplier amounts of data being an issue.
However if littered items don't contribute much to the normal data (objects, zombies, items within containers, cars), then it doesn't matter the multiplier because the server will have problems whether people are littering or not.
The dev already came in here and explained that not all data is sent to Steam's servers, just the credentials for authentication
We only found this Command in our ".ini":
UseTCPForMapDownloads=false
Should we turn this to true? We didn't find any other commands reagarding tcp/udp.
Edit: Btw we didn't change anything in the ".ini" so this would be default.