Ok, I get about an 250+ ping in every server under the maximum players of 25 and I’ll play for a while and then this lag spike comes up and keeps me at 999 and then never goes away. I even play in servers with 8 play limits and I’ll play for a map and then this lag spike will come up and never go away, even after it goes to the next map.
P.S. I’m on 56k.
Help me!!! 
:moo:
Man there must be at least ONE server thats close enough to you that you have some sort of decent ping (even sub 200 is playable), have you arranged the list of servers in order of ping ?
I was on a 56k for years playing q2, q3a & rtcw but i got adsl last month so i have not had to play ET with the high pings. I never came across what u have experienced, do u get disconnected when it happens?
have u tried progs like trace route & ping plotter to find teh best server?
u should use ping a lot as I often found that sometimes when i connect I would get a really bad ping +400 but if i reconnect it drops to 190ish constant(as constant as 56k is). I consider myself lucky with regards to 56k’s as I always had a good line for it one of my friends had his line split by the teleco so he could only connect at 33.6kps :disgust:
I’m not sure what the problem is as u haven’t given enough info
I don’t get disconnected, and everything is still moving , and everyone is still shooting around me, it’s just that I’ll get this sudden 999 that doesn’t go away. :bash: :banghead:
Where are you based geographically (nothing too specific as I know a guy on here called Tarquin who is a bit of a stalker) and who is your service provider.
I take it you have NOTHING internet wise running in the background, messenger, some description of antivirus scanner etc. Do the three finger salute to bring up the windows task manager to get rid of EVERYTHING that may interfere with your connect (even just once in a while interference) and connect to the lowest ping server you can find. See if that makes any difference.
Ive had this happen to me too on 128k ISDN though its totally random as to what causes it to happen. I wont repeat everything I did for troubleshooting (eliminated isp, background apps etc) in the end if i /quit wolfet i see a stream of data still coming in even though there is no upstream (from when the connection interupted hits not when I /quit).
Ive had some success limiting the framerate to 60fps and also setting the seta rate and maxpackets in the conf file to those recommended by quake 3 websites. (ive actually increased them from the default for isdn) It sometimes still happens but not as often as with the default isdn settings.
I think what happens is that something happens in the game that requires the server to send more info than is available to you either by whats defined in your conf or by your actual connection.
The next lot is educated speculation. I’ve never programmed an online game but this is based on various sources coupled with a little experience.
When you specify a 56k connection it sets the rate and maxpackets accordingly. These are the equivalent of a sampling rate for music. More samples in sound wave the more realistic… similarly the more snapshots of the gamestate the server makes, the smoother peoples movement from x to y. Wolf uses prediction to guess the inbetween to smooth things down a bit so people(or you) only really appear to jump when things get real bad and its resynching them with the server.
Resynching is caused by sending the entire gamestate from the server to the client. The data that is required to update the status of everything that has changed from the last snapshot is less than it takes to restate where everything is. Wolf only sends the whole gamestate at the start of the map or when a client has lost synch with the server (the server no longer knows what state the client thinks everything is on the server).
Why do things suddenly get desynched? Say 56k standard gameplay takes… 4k up / down a sec. Then something happens (three new players join at same time, someone moves an obj and someone blows an obj, someone fires a pg, and two others are smg dueling while another drops grenades) suddenly theres 20k of info to send in a sec so it takes 5 secs to send… then theres the other 20k thats happened since then (for the 5secs at 4k) which takes 5 secs and so on. Normally in games this will result in the server coping youve been desynched, it resends the gamestate and everyone jumps to what theyve done in the last 15 seconds… but I think in wolf because of the importance of relaying the state of all the objectives and the like the gamestate is a lot larger and boom you are desynced beyond the servers ability to predict again and it has to resynch you and so on until the gamestate gets to a stage which you can receive quick enough for it not to be stale by the time your finished receiving it.
Basically what Im saying is Et with its added features is pushing the upper limit of 56k (and even 128k isdn on active servers during intense gameplay) and even tiny problems with your connection to the server will cause you to be desynced from the server and a wait of many seconds before things will smooth out.
Solid proof that Irish men are the most intelligent beings on the planet, in my case I rank incredibly highly in the handsomeness category as well.
Sigh, I am soooooooooo lovely.