Input Lag

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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Me and a friend has noticed ourselves having input lag from the moment that we select a building to build via hotkeys, to the point at which we can place it by mouse clicking, adding a brief moment of forced “confirmation” focus needed before building placement, making it less effortless than how in sc2 we could easier swiftly slam down buildings.

I’ve personally also experienced some inputs not registering when typing too fast. This has been especially visible in the in-game chat, as “gg wp” ->“gg p” for me, not to mention that the next doesn’t appear immediately as I type. It might be valuable to add, that the skipping part is more prevalent after hitting spacebar, a button to which i’ve customized to activate as the “alt-key” post push, pre-release. The input delay, however, isn’t exclusive to me pressing this key.

I’ve noticed that sometimes, this phenomena extends to outside the game while aoe4 is minimized. It’s hard to tell in the heat of games, but I believe that this non-registration of input sometimes leads to some buttons some times not registering, forcing me to be forever vigilant on confirming every single command issued just to make sure it didn’t blank fire, reducing the sense of flow while playing. I’ve also experienced mouse-clicking icons of buildings without having them registered, although everytime it happens, I keep second guessing myself whether or not it was a missclick.

I don’t know if it’s due to our hardware ( we both run on Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti .) But I sincerely wish that I could play aoe4 without swimming through molasses. This phenomena to me is exclusive to aoe4. I’m used to playing sc2 at 200-270 apm for reference.

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To my knowledge this input lag falls onto the engine being simply adapted for an aoe game, instead of being made for it from the foundations, in other words, engine pipeline isn’t optimized for commands to go through instantly. Having played aoe2 and 3 for years, i noticed the lag very quickly, for me it feels like it takes a third of a second for commands to be executed when using hotkeys, not an apm god myself, but its a noticable delay regardless, and more fps you have, the more noticable it is, cuz with high fps its the only thing that doesn’t become smoother.

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the thing thats actually concerning is that this is all in singleplayer for me, and i’ll assume its similar for you, before any server latency comes into play, that one just ads to the delay after the fact.

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Thanks for confirming that it’s likely not due to my hardware. Feels good to know that I’m probably not playing with more handicap than everyone else. The singleplayer thing sounds like a great way of excluding lagg, well done.