How do I get a better ping?

[Matt Houben]

Hello,

Whenever I play on-line, the best ping values I get are between 200-300. Not very good. Also, in the middle of a game, ping values sometimes skyrocket into the thousands.

I use following system:

ASUS P2B rev. 1.10 motherboard
128 MB 100Mhz SD-RAM
Celeron 400 MHz @ 400 MHz CPU
Matrox Millennium G200 AGP 8 MB
Soundblaster Live! with digital I/O
Quantum Fireball EX 6 GB UDMA/33 HDD [C:, D:]
Seagate Barracuda 20 GB UDMA/66 HDD [E:, F:, G:]
HP8100i CD-RW 24x/4x/2x [X:]
3.5" FDD [A:]
5.25" FDD [B:]
MediaForte Momenta 56K PCI fax/voice/modem

The modem has its own DSP (its not a soft-modem). Is there a way to tweak things in order to improve the ping? The speed of the internet connection says 44.000 bps.

Regards,

Matt Houben
matt.houben@eurocontrol.be

[Matt Houben]

Oops, I forgot to mention: the game concerned is Unreal Tournament.

Regards,

Matt Houben

[Jorden]

Depends on your phoneline, maybe the distance to the server (not always true though) and the modem itself. A 56k modem with a 200-300 ping is usually good. (Hmmm, I usually play at larger pings, shoot my missiles, walk a bit and then almost see my missiles overtake me )

Ofcourse, to get a smaller ping, you could try to get a cable-modem or ADSL. If neither is available to you, and if you somehow want to cheat, why not set up your games as server? Then your ping is 0

Jord.

[xortam]

If you have the time, read my old thread on Q3A on-line play. Some posts there will point you to various sites that will help you tweak your settings.

[Beezer]

Like Jorden said, 200-300 is about as good as you can expect with a dialup connection. When your ping skyrockets, hit F1 and check the other players. If their's is also high, it's the server that's at fault. However, there may be some things you can do to make it more playable. I don't know what your fps is, but I'll assume it's acceptable to you.

First, you should update to the latest UT version -- 4.28. It has some netcode improvements for dialup connections. I seemed to notice a little bit of an improvement when I updated.

In your UnrealTournament.ini file you might want to play with a some of the following settings. Here's my current settings (I have a dialup connection as well) The first one doesn't have anything to do with network play, but may improve the overall "smoothness" to the game. To be honest, I don't remember the specific reasons I ended with these values, but they work good for me...

[Engine.GameEngine]
CacheSizeMegs=90

[Engine.Player]
ConfiguredInternetSpeed=2600

[IpDrv.TcpNetDriver]
KeepAliveTime=0.200000
MaxClientRate=30000
SimLatency=0
SpawnPrioritySeconds=1.000000
ServerTravelPause=4.000000
NetServerMaxTickRate=1
LanServerMaxTickRate=1

Here's some links to a modem tweaking and troubleshooting sites -- didn't really help me a whole lot, but it might help your situation...
http://www.voodooextreme.com/3Finger...f/nettweak.htm
http://808hi.com/56k/
http://www.computingcentral.com/topi.../speedtest.asp

On this last one, wait about 30 - 60 secs after the page has loaded. It automatically tests you line and give the results.

Good luck, hope some of this helps.

[Matt Houben]

First of all, thanks for all your replies.

I will certainly try all the suggestions. I have already tried some modem tweaks, but they did not make much difference. Since both cable and DSL are not available to me (and will not be for at least the next year) the only alternative is the good old 64 kbps ISDN. Does ISDN perform much better then the analogue 56K?

Also, I use the firewall ZoneAlarm. Both Unrealtournament.exe and Unrealtournament.icd have full access rights (both local and remote). Would removing the firewall make a big difference?

The game itself (when playing against bots) runs ok; I have put it in 640x480x16 bits colours. Avarage FPS is around 25-30. Textures are on medium. Number of bots is (IIRC) 9 and I have put them on 'adept'.

Regards,

Matt

[Liquid Snake]

64K ISDN will have a very slight increase in bandwidth compared to dial-up 56k. However, ISDN, being digital, will give much better pings. However, ISDN is relatively costly (it is usually metered, meaning you pay per minute).

I think software firewalls might slow down your system/affect pings, since it is another program running in the background.

[Matt Houben]

Here in the Netherlands, rental costs per month are only 7 EUR higher than the analogue line. Ticks (time units) are the same as I pay now for the analogue line (in Europe, unlike the US, local calls are also metered). It does involve some investement to get it installed, but there are special prices if you give up an existing analogue line. So maybe I should consider not to wait for cable (will take at least another year) and go for ISDN.

[Jorden]

Matt, hold on, wacht ff...

Where do you live? If in or around any of the big cities, ask if you have a chance at MxStream (ADSL), as it's being tested at this moment. Do know that for ADSL you need and analogue line at this moment (with ISDN kits only (maybe) coming sometime next year!!

Also, check with more than one cable company if they are able to get in your neighborhood. If all you can get is Casema/Wannado(o?), errrm, then forget I asked anything Too damn slow !!

Jord.