Wirehead Studios

Not sure if anyone else experiences this... but the game runs extremely choppy when I try to play it on the net. I have no idea why since it runs silky smooth when I just run my own personal botmatches.

I don't mean choppiness as in lag either... when trying to walk around a map, it's just... *chop*, *chop*, *chop*... and this makes it extremely hard to aim at targets. It just seems odd that it would run perfect when I play alone against bots, but get choppy when playing against other people over the net.

This seems to only occur in Gen... Q3F and vanilla Q3 (eeeeww) work fine over the net.

It runs smooth as silk for me.

However, Gen does send a bit more traffic for some weapons. The flamethrower is definately one of these. We've been improving the netcode with every release as well. There's some tweaks in 99d too.

It's not any of that really... can just be two people running around and not using weapons at all and it's all choppy.

I keep forgetting I'm on campus, heh... I'll just assume it's the college connection causing my trouble. Heck, last semester I couldn't play q3, or any game using the q3 engine, at all because it lagged too bad.

Turn on /cg_lagometer 1 and see if you're getting connection spikes of any sort. Also be sure to try it on the LAN.

Also be sure to try several servers. Here's a list of servers I get on the Eye.

NOBODY'S FFA[GENERATIONS v99c][www.nobodyshome.net] | 122ms | 209.184.234.84:27963 | Players: 2/8

GenArena Central[WHS] .99c | 115ms | 69.56.188.22:27960 | Players: 0/22

GenArena Central wolfy .99c | 91ms | 69.93.4.146:27960 | Players: 0/22

GenArena Europe[WHS] .99c | 191ms | 81.18.162.40:27960 | Players: 0/22

Tumistomb.com[GEN] | 101ms | 204.235.97.70:27961 | Players: 0/14

GetSomewhere.Net's Generations FFA | 66ms | 208.251.233.221:27960 | Players: 0/12

take a look at your netgraph bar and tell us waht you're seeing

cg_lagometer 1

green = good
yellow = bad
red = worse

And play around with the following vars:

cl_packetdup 0/1
cl_maxpackets (i use 80 for high bandwidth, and 40 for low bandwith conns, but try lots)
snaps 20/40
and ofcourse: rate, but you prolly know all about that :)

- i know it's not laggy choppyness, but it didn't seem to be for me either, and playing around helps. - also, it turns out setting mipmap quality to low for my radeon really helps to prevent choppy gfx.

ITS PUNKBUSTER I SWEAR ITS PUNKBUSTER!!  :angry:

I used to have a problem that sounds just like that.  Turns out it was caused by my high max framerate - I had it capped at 300.  Drove me CRAZY cause I did not think that would cause a problem with net play, but it does.  Took me like, a month to figure it out, too.  SP with bots was just fine, but hit the net... pffft.

yeha, cap your FPS at 125

there's no physics benefit after 125

PB had some birthing pains, but it's been pretty smooth for me.  As long as I remember to update before I play, lol - when it's a month between games, you get out of date.

Thanks for all the replies and useful information... I too, capped my FPS at 300, mostly because I feel it doesn't matter, heh.

Anyway, I haven't tested anything yet... I'll get around to it later. Feel like listening to music right now... and with me... music ALWAYS comes first.

:rockon: Megadeth - Wake Up Dead (Live - Rude Awakening) :rockon:

Trust me. FPS have an effect on ping. Not as bad as it did in q2, but the effect is there. Cap it at 125 and you should be fine.

com_maxfps also has another effect it will make you jump higher and farther if you increase your com_maxfps...this is really a pain for us mappers since we construct certain areas that shouldnt be reached by simply jumping there or when constructing "trick jumps" if someone increase their com_maxfps they can get there quite easy.. so please use the default value ;)

The 'sweet spot' is 125fps. Anything above or below that and you don't get the 1 unit higher jump. There's another sweetspot at like 83 or 76 or or somewhere around there, but it's not as good.

Well ok, here goes...

My netgraph is green, SO green, it's a crime. Anyway, modified a few things that were recommended and the 'chops' were more managable, but are still there. I just think it's my campus connection. Have yet to see how it handles when there's a lot of people on a server though... seeing as how I was alone on every server I tried.

In any case.. thanks much, at least it seems playable over the net now... for the moment.

76 is just as good as 125 - trust me :)

I wouldnt mind a steady 76fps with everything tweaked out to its highest.

@ 1600x1200x32     :)  
If only GF Ti cards could do the AA without stalling out...

Actually, com_maxfps over 125 does the extra jump thing too.  I've tested it.  I've been set at com_maxfps 200 and real fps as high as 148 at 1024x768 and it does it.  The 77 number isn't static either.  There's a bit of a range to it.  The bad thing is you have to be able to HIT the framerate you're set to in order for it to work.  Personally I detest this framerate-dependent behavior.  Being able to make a jump at one FPS that someone else can't at another is akin to cheating in my opinion.  If there was an easy way to code it out I would in order to keep the playing field balanced for all players.  At present, the only way to do that is to lock out a range between 70 and 80 fps, and cap everything to 120 or below.  There's a quick and dirty way to do that, but it's too severe a penalty to impose on everyone to keep people from upping their framerate to as high as their graphics can go if they wish.  It's a shame the snapshot rate from the client couldn't be set to a fixed interval instead.  That would help anyone's netplay at any FPS and get rid of little "cheat" behavior like this.  Since client-to-server snapshots are, as far as I know, controlled by the .exe it's going to have to stay as-is unless some other non-evil solution presents itself.  For now I'll just keep shooting certain people in the back when they hop those crates the wrong way.  :P  

something is becoming clear to me now .

no wonder I was owning the place in sof2 with 8fps .
the game let me win .

Trust whoever you like, but I play LOTS better when I have a smooth 125 fps visual and over 100 hz. Any lower on either and I start missing rails etc. The mind picks up so much more than you are aware of (unless you've got some kind of handicap ;)) - and it's only logical that you use this, provided your input hardware is precise enough.
The latter is also something that I'm very nitpickish about. I'm just a sucker for being able to put the blame where it REALLY should be at -> my faults :]

Actually that's very true, Tab.  I've determined that the higher FPS sends client snapshots to the server at a more precise interval.  The smaller the time between updates, the more precisely the movement physics are calculated.The 70-80 FPS "sweet spot" range is a sort of harmonic to this where the numbers round just right in order to replicate the +125fps behavior.  It's a bloody shame the client can't update the game logic independently of the rendering passes, but the renderer slows EVERYTHING down when FPS drops.

Well, we knew quake3 was sloppily coded - this is just a reassurance that we're not wrong about that ;]

I run Q3 at 640 x 480 with a monitor refresh rate of 60 hz.  Ph33r  :evil:

My average FPS usually is around 80 or 90.  It begins to drop on levels with a lot of shader effects or whenever there are a lot of dynamic lighting effects in my view.  Then I usually run around 40 or 50.

I feel your pain buddy. I started q3 on a celeron 566 with ONBOARD video. I ran640x480, everything off, picmip 5, and got 12FPS if I looked at a wall. Ten FPS if it was a corner. That extra triangle hurt. ;)

What's funny is Twilight plays like that deliberately.  :D

Oh I know. And so did about 75% of the people at quakecon.

/me points to his pentium 200mx with tnt2 32mb pci  where he played q3 on AND generations arena and even sof 2

Gahah!  I've only had this working graphics card for about 2 years.  Before I used to play Q3 on a 350 mhz with a shitty ATI Rage onboard.  I ran 8 fps on average.  :)  You have no idea how badly Generations ran on that thing. Hell I couldn't even really run OpenGL.  I had to download those GL drivers for Win98.  lol  I settled for SOG mostly instead though the sprites from Wolf's flame-thrower would absolutely kill my machine.

k6-2 450, 128 MB ram, and a RIVA-128! so HAH!

I know I am   :offtopic but...

Pfft.  I still have you topped I'm pretty sure.  The ATI Rage only had 8 MB onboard ram and my system had only 64 MB RAM.  I did later update it to 192 though.  The only guy that could have topped me was GK, but he had a 32 MB video card

:offtopic


pentium  300 mhz with a mortrox 8mb card in it .

every time I started q3a up after the first time he couldnt play of the movies , so I had to delete al the movies out of my quake 3 folder :P

after that I bought that nvidea tnt2 card . but I put it in my pc instead of that of my dad , thats why I was back on a pentium 200 mmx .


later we bought a geforce 2 for that pentium 300 . o then i had
pentium 200 mmx with tnt2
pentium 300 with geforce2




beat that  :evil:

Mortrox.. sounds like a brand Sauron would sell to orkish gamers...

Or something NeOrc is trying to shut down.  :D