Improve Your Choke (contributed by Artimus)
My choke was all over the place - From 0 to 50. Deacon did some magic to the server and recommended the following commands. Now I pretty much stay under 5 choke.
You can put those commands in your console each time you connect, or, better yet, change them in your autoexec.cfg so they will always be there. I found that file here:
Edit the file with Notepad, changing the values to those above. If that stuff above doesn't make sense to you, don't bother with it. You may make things worse.
Technical Terms (contibuted by Slayr)
Ping Lag
This is a general online gaming term, and refers to a situation where there is a delay between the actions of your character, and its impact on the environment, due to your Internet connection. For example, shooting your gun at a target, and the hit being registered a fraction of a second later. This lag occurs because of Ping which is the time in milliseconds for the round trip between when you do something on your computer, that data being sent to the server through your internet connection, registered, and the impact returned to your computer and displayed on your screen. The lower your ping, the less of this lag you experience, the higher your ping, the more lag you experience. To view your ping in real-time during a game, open the console (press ~) and type 'net_graph 3)' (without quotes) to turn on/turn off a network statistics display).
Packet Loss
If you have a relatively low ping but you are experiencing a 'warping' effect, whereby walking forward a few steps sees you suddenly warp back to where you started, then you are getting packet loss. This means that some of the information being sent/received through your internet connection to the server is being lost en route, and has to be re-sent immediately. There are two causes of packet loss - client side and server side. Client side is your PC and your Internet Service Provider (ISP). If you experience packet loss on all servers, and in various games then the likely culprit is the setup of your modem/network card/adapter and/or your ISP may be having problems. Contact your ISP for correct setup details and also to determine whether they have a known issue. Most often packet loss is due to a particular server experiencing problems and dropping packets. Leave the server in question and/or contact the server admin if it's a private server to inform them of the problem.
If you have a low ping and your character is not warping around, but your graphics feel slow, stuttery or 'laggy', this has nothing to do with your internet connection or the server, or high ping players on the server. This is specific to your system and is caused by one of the following:
Stuttering
If you have a low Ping, but experience frequent pauses during a round, some of which can be longer, some shorter, often occurring when you first see or hear a new item, character or sound, this is called Stuttering. It is often erroneously referred to as 'Lag', but it has nothing to do with your Internet connection.
Stuttering is simply your system struggling to get updated information not from the Internet, but from your hard drive. It can be reduced by optimizing your drive and making better use of memory. If nothing else helps, you will need to purchase more RAM and/or a faster hard drive.
Graphical Slowdown
If you have a low ping, but your graphics and controls feel 'laggy', especially during combat and heavy firing, you are experiencing a graphical slowdown. This is not based on your internet connection, it is directly the result of your system - especially your graphics card - struggling to draw all the details and special effects on the screen.
The only resolution to this issue is once again to optimize your system.
High Pingers are giving me the Lag!
This is blatantly untrue. High ping players joining a server may give a momentary ping spike, but once they are on the server, as annoying as it may be to see them warping about or running into walls, their ping does not impact directly on your ping in any significant way. The server allocates a maximum capped amount of bandwidth to each individual so again a player with a higher ping cannot draw more bandwidth than anyone else. The server doesn't slow down to provide data at a slower rate for dial uppers for example. If you look at your Ping and see that it is relatively low (i.e. below 200ms) then any lag you experience is because of graphical slowdown. If you're experiencing warping, that's packet loss and due to the server. If your ping is extremely high, and/or those of other players suddenly become quite high, then you may have a valid point in saying the server is laggy. However once again, this is not due to high ping individuals, since they cannot force a server to lag out. Note that virtually any time large numbers of people join/leave a server you will experience brief moments of ping spikes.
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(Moving to Dallas is not an option at this point xD)
