Cubey,
its very possible it could be adware that could be running in the background
and causing graphical hiccups and lag spikes.
Whenever you connect to an eGO hl2 server, the motd (message of the day)
window will open. Behind the scenes, HL2 opens up a IE web controller that
loads an eGO HTML document. The web controller goes through a program
called "SteamWebHelper.exe" and helps to display the webpage document.
eGO's webpage document has lots of ads that will connect instantly at startup,
I've observed somewhere around 30-50 ads being initiated at once... which
instantiates up to 30-50 steamwebhelper.exe processes.
The protocol, is for it to display the ads, and then close the connections.
You can also try typing "motd" in the game, and this can assist in trying to make
another call to close any ads that didn't close the first time around.
I've observed some ads or instances that haven't closed during the normal process,
so that's why it may be helpful to type "motd" later in the game... and check your ping.
it may spike again, due to trying to load the ads again... but might settle down.
Other servers like 6th and 1st marines, don't have the ads, so that could possibly be why
it seems a little smoother.
I have had some success by using my firewall to block steamwebhelper.exe after the game
is up and running, and then closing the processes. This works well, as long as you don't try
to access the steam overlay (shift+tab) or don't have to access your Steam Friends.
that way, eGO gets its ad clicks, and i can be certain that steamwebhelper isn't interfering
with my gameplay in the background.
I realize the ads help fund the server, but at the same time... I personally view this as a
security risk... you're basically allowing an Internet Explorer browser run in the background,
and all it takes is for 1 of those 30-50 ads to have some malicious code, to compromise your
machine. At one point, my firewall even quarantined halflife, because it deemed some code
injection to be unsafe.
every now and then i do notice some jittery behavior, but i haven't been able to pin-point it
to any one server in particular... more times than not, jittery behavior is usually due to behind the
scene CPU usage. Which could "definitely" be caused from something like an ad video running in
the background.
When the CPU-based lag spikes occur, sometimes i'll try typing "record demo" and "stop demo" in console ~ to get a refresh.
What might be helpful to you, in console type net_graph 3 or net_graph 2
to enable a visual interface to help shed some light on whats going on.
it may take some time though to sort out the meaning of your network statistics.
also open task manager, to verify you don't have any other programs interfering.
