Following complaints of serious lag and connection issues with PSN's Fat Princess, Titan Studios has finished a patch. The update addresses most (but not all, it seems) of the issues widely reported by early users.
Fat Princess
Gameplay footage
1:57Preparing for battle
Fat Princess
Gameplay footage
1:57Preparing for battle
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Our primary focus with this patch was to improve connections and reduce lag. We also addressed the AoE scoring exploits, a few other scoring imbalances, and made minor tweaks that should reduce stalemates. Here are the details:
The server selection heuristic has been modified so that ping time has been more heavily weighted when selecting potential matches. This will result in players being connected to games in such a way that game population and ping are more evenly weighted.
Newly hosted servers will be more attractive to potential clients and thus fill up more quickly. The change will also better distribute connection attempts among servers and thus reduce failed attempts.
Potential servers will be given less time to respond to ping requests. This should speed up that portion of the connection process.
Selected servers will be given more time to establish a connection, resulting in fewer failed attempts.
The connection code is less sensitive to packets coming back out of order. This was a cause of failed connections.
Ice Mage and Dark Priest AoE scoring has been adjusted from 10 points to 2 points per enemy affected.
Non-worker resource return has been reduced from 20 points to 10 points.
Feeding the princess has been reduced from 20 points to 15 points.
Castle door hit points have been reduced slightly from 30 to 25.
The Princess' calorie burn has been increased at weight stage 2, 3, and 4. Calorie burn was previously 2 per second at all stages. Stage 2 is now 4 per second, stage 3 is 8 per second, and stage 4 is 12 per second.
Titan Studios says that future patches will "address less common and less severe issues including: disappearing princesses, broken hat machines, migration issues, and the rank system. We may also address other features and balance issues."
Please try to bear in mind that it's pretty hard to accurately test your netcode on a small number of machines not going through PSN's hoops. I assume it worked perfectly well in testing, then when thousands of people started playing they noticed an issue.
Also, it's a small team releasing an indie game. Sure they may have people from big studios, but it doesn't mean they've ever needed to work on those areas before.
I bet it's still less laggy than both Gears of War games though :)
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