Excessive Lag

[Stoned]

Lately I have been getting epic lag storms when ever I play MSC. It's the worst on Edana, but I have been getting the same lag storm on other maps too. I highly doubt that the lag is due to an inferior machine; I can easily run source games on rather high settings.

 

[Thothie]

Ping or FPS? Either way there've been no major changes that should cause this, so IDK.

 

[cartman-2000]

What kind of hardware setup do you have, cpu and gfx card mainly.

 

[Stoned]

Ping or FPS? Either way there've been no major changes that should cause this, so IDK.

FPS

What kind of hardware setup do you have, cpu and gfx card mainly.

Intel Core Duo 3.00GHz and Nividia 9300 I think....

 

[Thothie]

I would tries dees rebootingz for fear of OpenGL stickiness. Also, after rebooting and starting the game, see if HL.exe's priority is set high (or, if it is, try another priority, as under Vista/7 it can actually bad if HL.exe out prioritizes your drivers, for unlike in XP, it does not have direct hardware access).

 

[zerome1221]

My friend seems to be having the same issue, he is running a good computer he runs almost every game we try which involves some highly graphical ones (Fallout & Oblivion). However any game he runs through steam lags terribly. His ping is rarely below 300 and sometimes into the thousands.

We have checked multiple times for anyone on his network downloading, we have also restarted his internet, router, and computer multiple times. We have tried changing his steam setting for his connection speed. He says he has 25m cable internet but steams highest choice is fiber/cable 10m. I have seen checking that as a solution on these forums. Now after much trouble I post with the same question. Sometimes he runs fine then we change map and instantly its 300+ ping, towns like Edana and Helana both seem to skyrocket his ping into unplayable levels. Any ideas?

 

[Thothie]

Ping and FPS are two separate issues. High pings are pretty common in this game, and it's more forgiving in that department than most games, since you are dealing with NPCs for the most part, rather than cross-client prediction, but 300 is a bit much - you might try finding servers closer to you in those cases. RKS has servers in the midwest USA, east USA, and Europe. (There's also a lot of asia servers, but they tend to be on odd ports, and thus are not showing up in my damn Steam browser, despite showing up in the FN logs - we gotta do something about that.)

As far as FPS is concerned... A lot high end (and mid end) ATI cards will run DirectX games (such as Oblivion and Fallout) just fine, but then choke to death on OpenGL games - especially if all the OpenGL extension features, such as Bloom, are enabled (set ms_bloom_level 0). Newer ATI drivers don't allow direct hardware access for OpenGL, even in XP, and in Vista/7, you're going through several more emulation layers to boot - whereas NVidia cards either allow direct hardware access (in XP), or a single DX10/11 emulation layer (in Vista/7).

 

[zerome1221]

If location is doing it then I will look tomorrow for one of those midwest servers hopefully near Dallas Texas. He is already set to a steam download region in Dallas Texas in his steam settings if that means much. His issue doesn't seem to be graphical or FPS related at all. We play other online games alright though ones through steam seem to just fall apart so I assume its some steam settings that are doing it but we cant find any that are making a difference.

 

[Thothie]

Hrmm... If it's just Steam games, Check that Steam hasn't changed its priority on you. Sometimes it'll do that, and then Steam's packets will start out-prioritizing the mod's. (Hit TaskManager via CTRL+ALT+DEL, hit Processes Tab, find Steam.exe, right click, set Priority->Normal.)

You might also try disabling the in-game Steam Community capability - the overlay maybe causing you odd issues. Used to crash this system - and still crashes my meaner laptop.

 

[zerome1221]

Actually we tried all that. I saw that priority solution and we tried disabling the steam overlay. We also tried playing it with steam in offline mode which actually worked. He would connect to a server for a few minutes of non laggy fun before it would kick him with the error message of "Cannot connect to steam"

 

[Thothie]

:\

I think you said somewhere that you've already tried changing the Download Region, in Steam settings... Only other thing I can think of, off hand, is ports - which it sounds like you have likewise already fuxed with abundantly. Definitely some strange Steam connection issue, but given everything you've tried, it's one I've not heard of before. :/

 

[zerome1221]

What ports need to be opened? Or where can I look to find out which ports need to be opened / forwarded to his computer?

 

[Thothie]

TCP:
27015 - 27017 (HL Server/Client Ports)
27020 - 27039 (inclusive)
47624 (DirectX Net port)
1300-1400
2300-2400
2790
6003
6500
7001-7002
27040 and 27041 (but only for CyberCafe Owners)

UDP:
1200
27005
27000-27015 (inclusive)
27025

That's the ports in the HLDS tutorial, plus all the client ports...

Since you're behind a router, you might also try to disable the windows firewall, as it's more hindering than helping anyways.

 

[zerome1221]

Opening the ports did nothing from what we can tell. Though through more attempts at playing it seems that his ping is all graphical. He lags terribly in edana or when lots of light is around. I cast glow and he cant look at me or he lags. Staring at the ground seems to keep him moving smoothly but you cant play the game by staring at the ground =P. Any more ideas?

 

[Thothie]

That behavior sounds akin to the Intel GMA, which really hates dynamic lighting.

Other than the standard low-end settings, I've not found a lot of solutions for that:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3004

r_dynamic 0 - doesn't seem to affect most of our dynamic lights. I'm kinda wondering if I should setup a client side cvar that disables all our client side lights... Downside to that, of course, would be you'd wind up blind in a lot of places where our mappers decided darkness was the way to go - though you might be able to counter that somewhat by playing with the gamma and brightness levels. r_fullbright 1, before a map load, may also work, though it'll look like ass, and may cause other fps issues. "setweather fog_red 1 1", or some similar such, may also help navigating in darkness with the lights disabled. Intel GMA doesn't seem to have nearly so much issue with the fog as with the lights.

 

[zerome1221]

I was on that topic you posted one time before and we actually tried putting every single one of those in that file you mentioned. However that file was empty when we opened it except for a reference to another one. Do we still put those changes into the file you said? Either way we tried placing them in that file like you said we just put one at a time until it seemed like they were doing nothing then we went ahead and just put them all, which ended up crashing the game then whenever he got to loading a map. We will try the one you suggested here though and see if it helps.

 

[Thothie]

Well, if you don't have an msc/userconfig.cfg file, something be up... You might have to manually execute it for it to have any affect then, via "exec userconfig.cfg" in console (likewise, you can dump it into a low_settings.cfg, and exec that instead, if you don't want to risk it exec'ing on its own). You'll have to exec it before and after entering the map for all the effects to take hold.

'b' cycles through bloom levels by default (should show you which bloom levels in the combat event text hud). That is, assuming it is bound to "choosebloom" (which can be set manually via "bind b choosebloom", sans quotes, in console). But yes, turning off the bloom should have an FPS impact.