Sniper's Paradise!
[Players Guide to Unreal Netcode]
3. Basic Unreal stats and settings:
In Unreal you can basically see two pings. The ping in the scoreboard (f1 ping) and the ping in the stat net display (press f6 in default keyboard layout to see it - f6 ping). Both are usually pretty different from each other. The reason is simple - they are calculated in different ways.
F1 ping is the ping the server gets to you while f6 ping is what you get to the server. While icmp ping wouldnt show a difference for that, Unreal does because the server and the client need different times until they send an answer back. More on the exact difference later.
Thesecond basic (because very important) thing in the stat net display is packet loss (pl). This is shown twice in IN and OUT columns - IN means the traffic you get from the server, OUT is the traffic you send to the server.
As you probably know, pl is a very bad thing. If you get constant pl on a server, all kind of crappy things can happen. Packet loss means that for whatever reason, some internet packets dont reach their target - either from you to the server, from server to you or (most frequently) both. That in turn means that you as a client might miss important information (like rockets being shot at you, other players moving around) and/or the server may do so (like knowing where you aim or that you didnt shoot that rockets right at your feet).
Usually packet loss is caused by some problem in the internet route from you to the server. To find out where exactly, see chapter 2. ;)
About the only thing you can configure for onlineplay clientside in Unreal is netspeed. First thing - forget Epics recommended settings. Second thing - yes, clientside fps is somewhat capped by netspeed. However, that doesnt really play an important role because it only places a maximum on your fps. That obviously results in less avg fps in display, but during the important situations your fps wont drop because they are below the cap anyway.
Keeping that in mind, you should always set your netspeed according to your real line capacity. Take into account if your connection is capable of handling that traffic in both directions simultanously (full duplex) or not (half duplex or some mixture). For euro isdn 64k, 6500 seems like a reasonable netspeed (it isn't really full duplex, but can handle like 6.5 kb/sec up and down simulatnously). For DSL and similar fast lines 20000 as default seems reasonable (you will never get more traffic in either direction anyway), but if you have trouble on some servers, try lowering your netspeed - there might be a bottleneck somewhere between you and the server. This is especially true if playing over long distances from country to country or even intercontinental.
While setting your netspeed to extremely high values might get you seemingly better fps, it could get you into problems when your machine is really fast; you could create more traffic to the server than your connection could handle, resulting in all kind of negative side effects. Even a maxclientrate appropriate to your connections capabilities won't help there because maxclientrate on server just afflicts downstream (traffic from server to you), not your upstream.
So now you're playing, your ping seems ok, no pl, and you still find playing laggy? That could be caused by various reasons. If that happens on all servers, the first thing to check is your local configuration. Firewalls, virus scanners, ICQ and other IM clients can all interfere with Unreal online play, so it's a good idea to try switching them off for playing and see if it helps. The next thing to check is drivers (especially if on ISDN) for your connection device, but also for graphic cards and other stuff. If you're connected to an external (DSL or cable) modem via ethernet, your network card might need other/newer drivers, or it could have some irq conflicts that cause trouble.
Once you checked your local machine, stopped all background tasks that aren't neccessary for survival, upgraded drivers and generally made your system run smoothly, the next thing to do is to check the connection to the server with one of the trace tools mentioned in chapter 2. Run such traces for some time (several minutes when pinging like once a second) and see if some ping spikes or pl occur. If you see problems there, try changing isps if you can to see if it helps.
If both of the above fail, it's time to have a closer look at the server - see the next chapter for this.
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