Alliedassault - laggers in multi player

Sh¡t people, I've been gaming over 14.4 modem since DOOM & online since Quake & there wasn't anything else but 28.8, 33.6, & 56k back in the Quake dayz. :P It's easy to wanna believe it's the 56k'ers fault. But Sniper Wolf is more on the right track than jumping down 56k ppl's throat about something alot of them can't control.

I'm no *expert* either but I see this scenario happen ALL the time in this game. Some fool running a listen server on cable/dsl with a 12 - 32 player limit & as soon as that 8th or 9th person joins it starts to lag severely. Usually a few people leave & it's fine again until a few more join & the cycle repeats itself.

Here's what to look for.

1) When it starts to lag severely, hit F1 & look to see if someone has a 0 ping. If so that means they are hosting a "listen server". Listen server = bad, dedicated = good.

2) Also look when it's lagging real bad to see if everyone's ping is getting progressively higher. If you had a 90 ping when you joined & most other ppl had about the same or in the 100's, & NOW everyones ping is jumping up to 500-900+, then you know the person has their bandwidth overloaded.

That is the truth. Of course people that don't know any better immediately start whining about the last person the joined or that damn 56k'er lagging the game...

Here's something I remember from my Unreal Tournament days. This is a rule of thumb to go by even in MOHAA because we ARE talking about a bandwidth issue here. I'll just paste the info in here from the tech support page at unrealtournament.com.

"> What should the MaxClientRate be set to, to allow good ping on an ADSL Server? And how many players would work well too?

It really depends on your ADSL provider. You need to work out what your maximum upstream bandwidth is in Bytes per second. One way to do this would be to ICQ a large file to a friend who is on DSL or cable, and look at what the transfer rate is, or if you know what it is in bits per second, divide by 8. ie 256kbps upstream bandwidth is around 32000 bytes per second.

Once you have that number, work out what maxclientrate you want to give everyone. 2600 is the bare minimum and it'll give modem-like netplay for everyone. 5000 is fine for modem and ISDN users but the play won't be quite as good as it could be for ADSL or cable users. 20000 is the largest you should ever go. The number of players you can support is the upstream bandwidth in bytes per second divided by the MaxClientRate you chose. So with 32000 bytes per second of available bandwidth, you could support:

32000 / 2600 = 12 players at modem quality play
32000 / 5000 = 6 players at ISDN quality play
32000 / 10000 = 3 players at better-than-ISDN quality play
32000 / 20000 = 1 player at LAN quality play.

I'd go for the 6 players at 5000 if all I had was 256kbps upstream bandwidth, because 5000 doesn't play too bad at all, and it's a good compromise."

Server ops take note. All your cable/adsl is likley going to support is 6-8 players. AND you need to set your maxclient RATE. I guess this is harder to do if you are running a listen server. But it can be done from the console after you start the game. I'm not sure what the command is in MOHAA.

OK, I think the command is:

set sv_maxrate "#"

So to set the maxclient rate to 5000 it would be:

set sv_maxrate "5000"

If that's wrong meybe someone could help me out here. Sorry this post got so long, but it's more what's happening to lag these servers than crying about those "damn 56k'ers"... http://www.alliedassault.com/ubb/wink.gif

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