Broadband - Packet loss QuakeWorld

pleuraXeraphim

Lads Hopefully some of you might have a suggestion.
I have a broadband connection with EsatBT and am connected to the Roches Street exhange in Limerick. When trying to play qw the past few weeks in the evenings I am getting terrible packet loss and I keep freezing and then it comes back and the goes again. Usually though if I try playing late at night it is sometimes fine. Not always though. This wasnt always a proble. It happened at the start of summer but then it was fine for about two months and now the problem is back again. I ran a spyware check and there doesnt appear to be any thing running that might be messing with my connection.

I can surf the net fine when browsing but its when I am playing qw i notice the problem. Played DOD2 last night but the game played fine but the ping wasnt great but I didnt appear to have much Packet loss. Maybe the game handles the network connections better than qw or something.

Anyone any ideas, or tools I could use that might help detect a problem. Is this just a contention problem on the Esat line. Is this normal?
I cant run a tracecert or even ping from command prompt. I have turned the firewall off.

Appreciate any help
Cheers

Illkillya

When I had IOL broadband I wasn't able to ping either, so I assume they disabled it as a security measure or something - maybe Ronin could confirm that. Despite this, programs like Ping Plotter and All Seeing Eye worked for me - so you can try out Ping Plotter freeware which will ping servers and tell you what pl you're getting.

If Ping Plotter returns good results, then its almost certainly not your ESAT line - and in my experience ESAT broadband gives very low packet loss. It is probably your netsettings in Quake World. Use rate 15000 and I don't know what other settings you should change, but test out on the Irish server games5.iol.ie I think it is. You should have about 26 ping and 0 pl.

The high ping in DOD2 may have been caused by the server you were playing on... obviously your ping will be high if it was an American server or something. Its also possible that the QW servers you were trying were dodgy, but most likely net settings. Btw, QW has better netcode than any other big FPS game I ever played - just it is more sensitive to net settings and stuff, and by default, qwcl has rate 2500 I think which would definitely cause you to lag out in a big ffa.

pleuraXeraphim

Heya
Thanks a mill for the reply. Tis appreciated.
I tried the Ping Plotter but when trying to trace to google.com it cannot reach it and says Destination Address unreachable. So not sure what I can do.

Fobia

As killy said, mess around with net settings.

Also, if you're in windows XP, try : "sys_highpriority 1" or 0, or -1. Anything other than -1 gives me tons of lag in-game...

pleuraXeraphim

Damn Tis no good.
I cannot play qw. Ive tried those settings but I still suffer the terrible Packet Loss. There must be somthing I can try.

Paladin

I have serious issues with my BT connection as well at the moment.
It was crap for the first few weeks I had it, and then it was perfect for a few weeks, now tonight again its sucking.

I suspect contention ratio problem. Sunday evening is a popular time for internet usage, but I just dont know. I believe the technical term for this problem (my QW friends inform me anyway) is my line is experiencing "teh suck".

Chaos

what quakeworld servers are about these days?

Fobia

Games5.iol.ie is the irish one..

Chaos

ah excelent must give that a go

Fobia

Do, one thing though, mIXu and I are on alot but we don't duel on the irish server, we play on UK's instead (for more equal ping), so you best bet if looking for a duel is simply to come to #qw.ie on quakenet and ask!

Chaos

got a lsit of the uk servers or where one might find them?

Fobia

The quake.dm4.co.uk:27500 27501 etc etc are the main ones, but we usually just use ASE..

Chaos

sorry im out of the loop for some time now but whats ase?

Chaos

Ah wait it just clicked that All seeing eye? Ill try that so thanks

Fobia

Google for "All seeing eye", hit the yahoo link, sorry can't link directly as it's not giving me the full URL..

You have to add qw manually afair, but it's worth it for the easiness of it all..

But as I said, just come to irc and we'll sort you out.