Half-Life players forgotten?

[Genom]

OK. I see everybody having great success with Q3. Woopy. But I wanna play TFC dammit. I have to pump all the way down to 640x480 to get decent multiplayer fps. That sucks! I REALLY wanna play it on my G400 at a decent res with good speed but it's like, the 1 dang game that isnt running very well at all. Any news on the newer drivers? Cant we even get a old beta to mess around with? Hell, I'll sign a "Non bitching cause beta drivers screwed me up" contract

[Tn]

I play on 800x600x16 just fine, well until someone starts spamming... What is your system like? I have 56Kmodem, K6-2 350, SB Live Val, 128MB RAM, UDMA HDD, Win98. Oh and my pings are usually 225-350. Personally I'm glad people play Q3 cuz all the DMers that refuse to learn teamwork go away.

I forgot to say the most important part:
Marvel G200 w/ 4.51 drivers running D3D.

[This message has been edited by Tn (edited 07-30-99).]

[Kruzin]

I play HL/TFC a great deal. I make sure Matrox knows every little thing I see in the game on the beta drivers.

When I played on my G200, I did it at 800x600x16bit OGL, and the speed was good enough for me (don't make me whip out my 25fps limited scoreboards again )

Now that I have a G400, I play at 1152x864 OGL, and there is NO problem with the speed it plays at. Even in high action situations, I get no noticable video slowdowns. I'm more likely to see internet lag affect the game than a video deficency...

[djroberts]

Well, yes. I'd say your chapped. Someone on this site from Matrox calimed that Matrox found the problem and is immediatly fixing it. Well, that was weeks ago and no one has metioned it since. I don't play first person shooters but I do feel for you...

- DJ

[Genom]

OK. System specs are P3-450 at 556, 384MB 8ns SDRAM, Ultra2 SCSI hard drive, MX300 sound card, 3COM 10-100 ethernet and the G400 32MB Dualhead retail. I thought it might have been an issue with overclocking the card, but After clocking everything at the regular speed, same thing. I have no system stability problems and Direct3D games run awesome wether I overclock anything or not.

Kruzin: I really apreciate all the info you post here and know it's all done out of love, but seriously, wether YOU play good with a low FPS is you. I got used to high frame rates with an old TNT and going to a much slower fps is very hard to do. I would willingly put up with it for the higher res and better detail, but under 10fps in a 2fort match with another 9 players is unacceptable. Even the TNT does better than that. My ping times arent an issue, since I can get 190-300 on most servers I play on, and if I just jump to the machine with the TNT and play, it moves along great, but the G400, once you get more than 2 players on screen is a nice looking slideshow. I have re-installed the drivers, cause lately it has also begun crashing on me in TFC, but same thing continues to happen. I have tried disabling the 32bit Z-buffer to no avail. If I run a LAN game by myseklf I can get decent frame rates at 1024x768, but they still could be faster, but again, even on a LAN, add another couple players and it lags to unplayable levels. As it is I jump over to the other amchine JUST to play TFC, and that really sucks. I saw a few weeks ago a post by R0M about this beeing a known problem and beeing fixed, but since sadly nobody knows when the next drivers are coming out, I feel frustrated is all and need to vent. Fortunatly here I can vent and maybe someone will tell me something like "You fool! all you have to do is edit the registry and add the discombulator key for it to work"

[Kruzin]

Gnom - If you are really getting 10fps when you join a multi-player game, then I would be more suspect of the way you are set up, either in the game, or in your DUN settings. You get pings similar to what I get. I can assure you, I never get that slow, unless dropping net packets left and right do to exessive fps. Your FPS does control your net packets, and too many net packets will lag you out, causing severe slowdowns in the game.

I went onto a 2fort map, with 16 players on it. I ran the commands "developer 1" and "host_speeds 1" to show my FPS. I have to limit to 25fps, or I get severe lag (which will cause slowdowns - even on a LAN if it's set too high). During the entire round, in all situations, my FPS stayed right at where I limited it to. When I raised my fps_modem to 30, it stayed there, until I got into battle, when the net lag would kick in. Switching back to fps_modem 25 cleared that right up. I never saw 10fps while my connection was steady. System stats below - 'cept it's clocked at 464 right now, no o/c to the G400.

------------------
P2-450(@112*4.5=504), Asus P2B(1009), 128meg PC100, MillG400 32meg(PD5.20.???), CL SB Live!Value, CL PC-DVD, Mitsumi CD-R, WD UDMA 8.4&6.4 gig, (2)USR 56k(multilinked), 3Com 905B-TX, etc...

[Kruzin]

BTW-
The commands to tweak in the game are:
fps_modem xx (25-35 for most)
fps_lan xx (for LAN and cable/dsl...30-40)
rate xxxx (2500-5000, depending on connection)

Also, if you haven't heard yet, Action Half-Life is now out...gonna try it this afternoon

[Genom]

Welp, I've tried almost every HL tweak I can find. If it's just me or another 2, maybe 3 people visible no problem. SOON as there is more than 4 the lag comes umbearable. It's not the connection. If I Change to the TNT machine (they share the modem off the server) on the Same game I was in, it runs great. on the G400 I get lags so bad as to be that I click to shoot and there is a 3!! second pause before it happens on screen. I have tried changing my rate setting, pushlatency, setting limits to fps, everything. And this is at 1024x768 with 16 bit color, so it's not even that high. I am OC the CPU ATM but not the G400, but same thing happens at regular clock speed. I mean I was on a 8 player 2fort match and I saw fps dip under 10 fps severall times out in the open just running around.

*sigh*

[Kruzin]

OK...there's another hint in there. Sounds like you are using a proxy. Is there a way you could put the modem directly in the G400 machine, and try it directly instead of through the proxy? Or perhaps compare all of your LAN and proxy settings between the tnt and g400 machines to see if there is a major difference that might cause this.

Or, maybe put the tnt in the g400 machine, and see how it plays. If it still gives those slowdowns, you will at least know it's not the video card (or is, if thats the case).

I have never used a proxy for gaming, but I have heard they are tricky to get set up for that...

Another thought might be to try another video mode. I have been assuming you are using OGL mode. Does this still happen in D3D mode?

[Genom]

Apreciate the suggestions Kruzin. Here goes latest stuff: I dont run D3D mode for it because it makes these texture errors all over the place. I'll try later to see how the speed goes.

Now, let me detail the setup I have. I have 3 Machines here right now. 1 is the server machine that is running with a 56k modem and a 10/100 etehrnet card. This box runs windows NT and the proxy server is Sygate 3.0 This machine is a decent P2-350 No OC on it since it's the server really for files and stuff. This machine has 256MB ram, has an uptime of 54 days so far. pretty stable.

Next Machine is the one with the TNT. This box has 2 P2-333's running at 375 with 352 MB RAM. It has no modem, just a 10-100 ethernet card. The last machine is a P3-450 at 556 with 384MB Ram and the G400. Again, no modem, just a 10-100 ethernet card. All the machine sare linked with a 10-100 switcher, so no collisions like a hub. Now, the TNT machine works fine on servers I frequesnt, like the Kali hunted server. If I dosconect and imediatly connect with the G400 box I get this problem we have been discussing. The only difference between the 2 computers is their network settins basically, beeing 1 number difference or it wouldnt work

If I pull out the tnt and put it in this mahcine it works fine. If I put the G400 in the other mahcine, well, it's running NT and the G400 drivers arent the best in NT but it doesnt run fine basically. So I know for pretty sure it's the board somehow. Now, i know it isnt a bad board cause this is the only game this happens in. For the hell of it I removed all my old drivers and reinstalled just to check, but same problem applies. Guess It's just one of those mysterious glitches that hopefully the next revision drivers will solve. I have even tried disabling dynamic lighting and all other type of fx to try to get it to run faster. And when there is nothing on screen at 1024x768 if I use r_speeds I see fps iun the 70's. but as soon as anbody shows up then things start going south. Oh well, I apreciate the suggestions.

[Joel]

I have you agree with Kruzin. There must be some sort of a setup problem.

I played HL for about a 1/2hr this morning at 800x600 on a server that I specificaly choose with a 200+ ping time, with about 12 other people, and except for the occassional slow down during heavy, and I do mean heavy, action things were pretty good. And I feel that on my machine in OGL that is saying alot. I have an AMD K6-2/400 with the G400.

Joel

[Tumu]

I think that Genom is having the same kind of video stalls I had when I tested the PD5 with Quake 2 crusher.dm2. On occasionally my G200 would stall to 1-3 fps for 1-5 seconds and would then continue running at 20+ fps (at 800x600x16bit). I have also got those stalls during normal gameplay in GLQuakeWorld (640x480x16bit window) and Quake 2 Gloom mod (640x480x16bit fullscreen). The GLQuakeWorld stalls happened just after respawn and no other players were on the view. And I have used just about all tricks in the books to optimize my internet connection and I have to say, that PD5 (or G200, but I think that's very unlikely) has problems.
I emailed Matrox tech support for texture problems in crusher.dm2 and got a reply that the texture management will be improved.

-Tumu

--
Celeron 333 (not overclocked), GigaByte 6BXE Intel 440BX AGPset Mobo (bios v3.2),
64MB PC100 RAM, G200 8MB SGRAM (not overclocked, bios v1.6, 486 fan included),
PD5.13.020, SB16 Value, 3COM Fast EtherLink XL,
Sony Multiscan 100ES, Win95OSR2.1 finnish

[BanderSnatch]

Anyone else seeing severe stability problems in HL? Ever since I moved to Powerdesk 5.13 and HL 1.0.1.0 it has become unusable. I get crashes in OpenGL mode and hangs in D3D mode (when saving). It happens at all resolutions I have tried and it kills my OS. Diagnostics show everything working, DxDiag show everything working, version 6.1a. Any ideas? Anyone else running HL 1.0.1.0?

[BanderSnatch]

Genom, I just noticed in the HL readme.txt they suggest setting r_decals lower as a help for low multiplayer framerates. Default is 4096, they suggest setting it to 500 (type "r_decals 500" on the console command line). Something to try, if you haven't already.

[Tn]

If we want to get into tweaks for multiplayer HL...
cl_allowdownload "0"

cl_allowupload "0"

fps_modem "(frame rate you usually get)" mine is set at 25 for a Marvel G200

pushlatency "-(twice usual latency)" mine is ~250 so I put -500

put these into your autoexec.cfg(in the main folder for the game, tfc would be half-life\tfc, or the video mode cfg you use in the valve\hw folder)