Improve playability on unreliable internet connections

[the_gamer_guy]

Not sure if this is the correct board for this, I was wondering if it would be possible to work on improving the playability of multiplayer on unreliable connections? Me and my friend have been playing on our own private server for a few months. Recently he moved and had to get a different ISP. His connection with the new ISP now has about 10% packet loss on a good day (verified by pinging google, his ISPs website, and my server IP). Vintage story doesn't seem to handle packet loss very well and he is constantly having huge issues with animal movement, item interaction and item dropping. It seems as though he becomes heavily desynced from the server. For example, if he drops an item, the item will never appear on the ground to him until he rejoins. Same with animal movement, their death state, etc. I'm not a professional with netcode but other games we play, like Killing Floor 2, Minecraft, Team Fortress 2, etc handle the packet loss and are almost completely fine for him on the same connection. Would it be possible to give vintage story the same ability to handle packet loss?

Edited September 27, 2022 by the_gamer_guy

[Rhyagelle]

I have no packet loss with my ISP and I have experienced this problem on hosted servers, too. It seems to be severely aggravated when the server is over 15 people. 

[the_gamer_guy]

Interesting... I haven't actually experienced this issue, but I've only ever played our private server with just me and him online. It seems like maybe its related to the way VS handles networking on a per-client basis? Because when he's running into all these desyncing issues, everything is working totally fine for me at the same time. I've also done some research and I noticed that VS uses TCP, which handles packet loss at the protocol level and resends packets that don't reach their destination. This and your comment make me think that maybe it isn't the packet loss per se that's causing the issue he's experiencing.