Game feels broken - help is needed.

[NEPHIREM]

Played 3 games now. Game works like absolute garbage. This morning I played 18 games and won 14 of them. Now, I struggled to hit 30acc and maintain positive k/d. Brilliant.

On Asylum game, I entered the teleport (I heard the sound of me entering) and game pulled me out and showed that I was in fact fragged before I entered. So, how am I supposed to play game that is unable to tell me where my OWN position is, let alone my enemies'?

Tomorrow morning I will test again. If this game works properly only in the mornings, it will lead to me not renewing my sub again because, well, I usually work in the morning. There is no point in paying for a game that offers me good gameplay once a week.

[c3]

Thanks for replies.... Didn't try reset to defaults yet, maybe I'll give it a try.

I'm certain that my PC is not to blame because this is 2nd PC this is happening on. No frame drops - game feels sluggish. Today I experienced pretty huge green spike coming out of bottom green line... It happened twice, not sure what that is about. What happens in-game is actually pretty much the same thing I posted last year, only then it was happening on 60+ pings only - now, my ping doesn't matter at all.

Old post: http://www.quakelive.com/forum/showt...rs-experiences

Anyway, my specs:

Phenom II x4 @3,8Ghz
16GB DDR3 1333Mhz
Radeon 7970 Ghz edition
SSD

Just because you're experiencing the same issue on two different PCs doesn't mean your 'system/OS' isn't to blame. If you're running window's 7 on both machines, and you haven't optimized your OS on either machine, you will still run into the same problems.

Just a hunch, but try these tweaks and report back:

Go into your BIOS:

Disable High Precision Event Timer (HPET)

Disable CPU Enhanced Halt (C1E), EIST (SpeedStep) & Cool'n'Quiet

Disable Intel Hyperthreading

These settings SIGNIFICANTLY increase input lag and give you enormous/intermittent DPC latency spikes which could explain why sometimes QLive runs fine and other times it doesn't.

I'd check out the below tweakguide as well... the best available for Windows 7 IMO.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forum....php?t=1315790

The above guide resolved many of my issues.

[NEPHIREM]

Well, I did what c3 said before I started playing this morning... No change. Game felt sluggish despite lagometer not showing anything out of ordinary. Ty for suggestions tho.

I have found out what causes red spikes (packet loss?) - family member listening to music using a tablet with last.fm scrobbler active. Scrobble causes spikes, but interestingly there is no difference in how the game feels and runs, spikes or no spikes.

Are there any cvars that I could try out? I already use rate and cl_maxpackets set to max, is there anything else? Perhaps I should tweak something in catalyst settings? I have pretty much everything set to default there.

[Lorfa]

Well, I did what c3 said before I started playing this morning... No change. Game felt sluggish despite lagometer not showing anything out of ordinary. Ty for suggestions tho.

I have found out what causes red spikes (packet loss?) - family member listening to music using a tablet with last.fm scrobbler active. Scrobble causes spikes, but interestingly there is no difference in how the game feels and runs, spikes or no spikes.

Are there any cvars that I could try out? I already use rate and cl_maxpackets set to max, is there anything else? Perhaps I should tweak something in catalyst settings? I have pretty much everything set to default there.

rate 25000
cg_projectilenudge 80

You could tinker with cl_timenudge, or cl_autoTimeNudge. I mention them in the guide (www.regurge.at/QL/Lorfa)

[BuzzBlade]

I personally think after viewing your specs, you have a serious underlying issue w/ your hardware, or your system is infected w/ malware/rootkit. Your quad core should handle quakelive w/o stutter w/ whatever onboard or pci-e card you have. You compound your dreamy SSD into the equation and you should come to terms w/ the fact your machine laughs at quakelive... it's more powerful than a PS3.

I could be wrong but I don't believe quake3 takes advantage of SMP. So you only have one core in effect. But even so the other 3 cores should be stomping all background processes because windows is taking advantage of your CPU. So really you have one of your cores that gets devoted to the process.

If your heatsinks on CPU / GPU are caked in dust and lint; lack of airflow can cause serious overheating to the point your thermal paste(s) dry up bad and things fry. Even if you were to clean the heatsinks and replace paste and provide proper ventilation permanent hardware stress will still remain possibly. Listen for high pitched buzzing when you flip the rear power switch 'on' the power supply. Give your motherboard physical observation for swollen capacitors or burnt looking circuitry. Tell tale signs something went wrong or is still wrong.

I wouldn't ever screw w/ cool n quiet in the bios personally, I've had bad experiences w/ this having the opposite effect and the fan just stays in powersave governor rather than performance or userspace, and it overheated the CPU immediately and the board killed its own power by default. I tried to reboot to change it back but the CPU wouldn't cool down enough to let it boot and then freeze in POST. I had to wait 30 mins for it to cool down long enough to access the bios again to turn it back on.

If your absolutely sure it isn't your hardware....

I run a Athlon X2 2.4 125 w/ modest graphics. average 70 ping.

' Netcode ' was the fab word we had for this back in beta.

gluck.

[*ARMED]

exactly same probs here as op.... very well described! ....since years and many machines.

this is why i dont play anymore or should i say the majority dont play anymore.

[pikaluva13]

Hello everyone. I'm having some troubles with this game so I decided to post this here hoping that someone could help me out. So, what's happening is this.

QL has two types of behavior - when it works properly and when it's broken. When it works properly it's alot of fun - I feel in control of my gameplay, it's smooth and responsive and my acc is between 50-60 (I'm an instagib player). On the other hand, when it's broken, game feels slow and unresponsive, sluggish and I struggle to stay above 30 acc. I'm well aware that people have good days and bad days but this is not the case here. When you play this since 2009 and you find your acc going below 25% on dm17 insta it's a clear sign that something is wrong.

When game enters it's broken state nothing works. I cannot hit a guy using a jumppad. Firing a rail down the corridor occupied by 3 enemies produces no hit. I get hit when I'm one good circle jump behind corner - stuff like that. Everything seems "off" - enemies are not moving at constant speed. For example, guy is running to the left - I see his model facing left and his legs moving. But he is not moving at speed he is supposed to, he is moving almost like in slow motion and when I fire a rail he enters a "fast forward" state for a fraction of a second and avoids my rail - matrix Neo style. Hard to explain, it's like game adjusts his position and trigger for that is me firing my railgun. This messed up speed thing hapens quite often when guys are using a jumppad - it looks like gravity is off.

This sounds like he's lagging. When this occurs, have you looked at their ping? (It *could* be lag hax, but that's a lot less likely)

Some more random stuff happens with sound too. Jumppads not producing a sound. Unable to hear guy jumping till the moment he is right next to me - keels should be loud, yes? Everything feels "off" and delayed. I sometimes experience stuff like I press the fire key but my gun didn't fire on time and I get fragged. Then when I respawn my gun fires automatically and I need to wait for it to reload.

This is probably because you're clicking for the game to respawn you and you end up spawning, click again, and then fire. This sounds more like an operator issue than a game one.

Stuff like this matters in insta. All of this has caused me to stop playing iCTF because I don't want my broken game to affect my team. It really sucks.

It's insta. There's no stats for it. Who cares if your performance isn't 100% all the time? Just play to have fun, regardless of your stats.

I tried turning on my lagometer when game felt broken. I discovered that almost every time I get railed, railed someone or someone else gets railed in my vicinity a yellow spike appears on the blue line. No matter what my ping is - it happens even with 35 ping. I tried to fight this with cl_autotimenudge 1 and to my surprise it worked! But it worked only for a week or so, now it's random - sometimes it works, but mostly it doesn't. I feel no difference with nudge set to 0 or 1. When it's set to 1, blue line turns yellow without spikes but gameplay feels the same - broken.

Probably placebo effect.

Sometimes it's broken for half a game. Sometimes it's broken whole day. Totally random. And recently I have started to notice that these problems are most obvious with players that ping 30 or lower - most of them even warp. But since no one complains about it, I guess they warp only on my screen. Eh.

This I'm not sure what the case is, but I also have issues with low-ping players appearing to lag when they're perfectly fine. Then again, I used to have no framerate drops in-game when I used to lag, but when you watched the demo it'd be obvious.

Is there anything I can do on my end? Some cvars maybe?

Have you messed with cl_maxpackets / rate and the such yet?

Any help is appreciated. Oh.. And yesterday I started to get red spikes on the green line everytime I died - not massive spikes, more like a vertical line or two...

Anyway, sorry for this wall of text but I really don't know what to do anymore.

That's when you died, so it's not really an issue.

[c3]

Well, I did what c3 said before I started playing this morning... No change. Game felt sluggish despite lagometer not showing anything out of ordinary. Ty for suggestions tho.

I have found out what causes red spikes (packet loss?) - family member listening to music using a tablet with last.fm scrobbler active. Scrobble causes spikes, but interestingly there is no difference in how the game feels and runs, spikes or no spikes.

Are there any cvars that I could try out? I already use rate and cl_maxpackets set to max, is there anything else? Perhaps I should tweak something in catalyst settings? I have pretty much everything set to default there.

Nephirem,

Did you check out the tweak guide I posted? Did you go through all the tweaks and test? There are a million things that can cause lag spikes, and it's not always based on your network connection... quite often, Window's services can cause intermittent lag spikes, give your games a sluggish feeling, etc.

Some services you should definitely disable are 'Windows Event Log' and multimedia class scheduler (This one you have to do properly though, check the guide)... both rob your bandwidth and cause intermittent network issues.

Also, in your BIOS, did you disable all your 'C-State power settings?' There are often more than one... sometimes up to 3-4. Your C-state power settings significantly increase your DPC latency which will cause quake to run sluggishly.

Download this:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/...-Checker.shtml

DPC Latency Checker. Let it run for 3-5 minutes and report back your (us) findings. Acceptable ratings will be between 50-150us (bad IMO, but acceptable). Personally, mine ranges from 2-15us.

[Sheleft]

I've been getting this as well. Posted a few times in the past about it and have yet to find something on my end thats able to fix it.

[NEPHIREM]

c3, I didn't really have time to go through all of what is written in the guide and to be honest, I'm not really that knowledgeable about computers. It takes time for me to swallow all of that. But still, thank you for the effort.

What I did do is that I downloaded that latency checker and let it run for 5 minutes. I guess the result is not so good, eh?

http://i49.tinypic.com/2hwigjl.jpg

After that test I played a few games. It felt a bit "off" at the times, but it was tolerable somehow.