ONLINE GAME PLAY

[JRuffin]

If someone knows...
Internet speeds are OK, but online gaming sux. What gets me is its always been good, until recently. This is the deal:
1. When I first start a game its great for about 5 mins. Then gets choppy and downright unplayable.
2. I recently upgraded to Win98.
3. I have a 56k V.90 U.S. Robotics Modem
4. VooDoo3 AGP 3000 video card
5. 128megs Ram
6. Pentium2 400mhz processor.
This is happening to all my online games!
Any help would sure be appreciated!!
John

[xtant]

Does it only happen when you're playing online? I had a problem before where framerates would drop from 60 to about 5 in 10 minutes because of video driver problems.

[Bleeding Edge]

Buried in the modem connection properties is the Port Settings. The one with the FIFO checkbox and the two slider controls for the Receive and Transmit buffers.

Lower the receive buffer one notch (or just hit the default button) and restart the machine. Get online and try several of your games. Should help.

[LittleKing]

I have just started play online so might advice might not be the best, but I'll give it anyway.

I started half-life and it was very very choppy. I have a P3-450, V3-3000, 128MB PC100, and it was still choppy. So I got online and searched for an answer. What I came up with was two solutions. One was to connect to faster servers. Duh! /forum/smile.gif And what helped determing faster servers was a command that I had to enter into the run line of the program. You would have to find out what lines, if any , would work for your games. The second solution was setting memory for a memhold (or something like that I edit the message when I get home and can look at it), which reserves so much memory for the game. Like I said it worked for half-life so I don't know if it will work for other games. Hope you can figure it out.

LK

It's called heapsize XXXX. Where XXXX is the amount of memory you want it to use.

[This message has been edited by LittleKing (edited 11-05-1999).]

[JRuffin]

Thnks, I will try these suggestions and let you know.

Have a good one!
John

[xtant]

In most online games there are console commands that you can enter to customize your transmissions to your connection speed. For example, in HL, you'd want to set pushlatency to correspond to your modem speed. I don't remember all of the settings for it, since I set mine some time ago, but http://half-life.pcgame.com/multi.html is a really good guide on setting your config for HL. I'm sure Q2 and 3 both have the same kind of settngs.

[Axel]

do you have "seti@home" running as your screen saver? It will run in the back-ground doing millions of floating-point calculations chewing CPU time while you are playing -
Check your task manager before you start your game and make sure to turn off anything you don't absolutely need. Goes double for anti-virus programs - they see and scan the stuff coming over the internet connection which can kill your gaming speed. Big risk turning that off - make sure you're on a clean site, but you could still catch something from another gamer while on-line.