The ping spikes are due to a lot of commands being sent and received at any one given time .. that's inevitable.
And the animal pathing was designed for a single level structure so that can be a hit or miss thing.

Just to elaborate on what Michael means, basically the animals "see" the world as a flat plane, so as they wander around the world objects that are on or just below the same plane as them register as an obstruction, while objects above it are ignored.

An example is building a dirt wall around your tribe and then adding a wall on top of it, that will stop most players from getting inside, but a bear wont register the wall as being there and will climb up and over the dirt pile.

Similar issue with terraforming a flat area on a decent slope, you are going to have a dirt bank where you have had to build up the ground level, animals can't "see" what's on top of the bank and will just walk up the bank into your tribe. This one give the animals a problem, because once they are inside your tribe they are at the same level as your buildings, and are stuck as they can't "see" a way out.

There is an "issue" with gates, dismantling one means that any walls touching it, above, below or to the sides, no longer register as being there to animals. Dismantling the "bugged" walls doesn't help as the bug gets passed onto any walls touching them, basically you are looking at a total dismantle and rebuild of most of the external walls and gates in your tribe.

Even a simple internal redesign of your tribe can break the external walls, on War I had two "cabins", each was in a corner of the tribe, removing them resulted in me having to dismantle and redesign roughly 80% of the exterior walls, only the area at the front gate didn't need to be touched.

On Peace I have Scrapper Corrugated walls around the outside, they stop animals from getting in or out, they also don't touch the main walls in any way that they can catch the bug, which is just as well as the inside around my animal enclosure is a mass of bugged walls.

So, you agree that there is some kind of problem with animals coming through walls on war server. And possibly peace as well? Great, that's why I made the post.

I removed a rock that was 2-3 meters from a fence line that is the barrier that surrounds my tribe. The fence line was still intact yet animals started coming into the tribe area at the spot in front of where the rock was removed. If your theory is accurate, the rock removal bugged the fence at this location.

This sounds like something players would want fixed and that the dev would want to fix as well, no?

How big was the rock, they can be like an iceberg and have a large area of interference, as a result it could be the section of fence has never stopped animals and it's been the rock that was stopped them.

Rock was sml-med sized (3m x 1m). I'm leaning toward the scenario of removing a structure bugs those beside it as the problem. Once the rock was removed 3-4 animals came through a scattering of 6-8 rocks outside my tribe and pathed right through the fence into tribe. The rocks on the outside did not hinder them in the slightest so the chances of one inside with ample space around it doing so seems slim.

If you'd like to make an official bug post concerning your issue (which I'm guessing is related to mine), I'll be glad to second it. And we can leave it with Xsyon. Enough said.

I'm going to close this one.

The wall collision issues (actually path finding problems) are known and are being fixed in the new path finding system that I've been working on (among many other things). There is another bug report kept open as a reminder (https://www.xsyon.com/project.php?issueid=2427), although it's one of the major issues in my Creature Revision task list anyways.

Ping spikes are still going to happen especially in areas with a lot of construction or creatures or both. The ping rate is actual ping + processing time on the client and is affected by local rendering and command processing especially loading. I keep trying to optimize all systems but it's an ongoing never-ending task :-)