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James I. Battles Sunday, July 09, 2000 10:56 AM

I am in agreement with lpb's taking the hit in the netcode but on a lighter note maybe in the beta testing it will gain some consideration in the future . I have noticed an ample amount of old bugs resurfacing as well. In 2fort it appears that the emp grenade properly placed will kill everyone in respawn again , and also after a long time of not seeing it I died in a respawn frag the other day. Thought that was gone too. In the game I have had as a low 100 like 130 ping in an instance where I put the red dot on a player 4 times and pulled the trigger with no joy. I mean it was a no hit and then he ran up and killed me . It kind of sucks hehe. The other thing I experienced was where my shot seemingly did not go off. I was not standing on an entity or anything. Maybe it's my mouse taking a final dump but it seemed like a bug. The statements about the gamespy are justified but the current regged beta gives much higher pings and I cant really tell if I am doing as well as I was. After installing the newer gamespy my ping went from 80-100 to 137-156 and higher. again I am not sure why because I tweaked my cable modem and it is faster than ever . A fresh run at msn bandwith speed test rendered me a whopping 3090 kbps. I sustain a download as high as the server will let me. I sustained 359kb a sec on a download after it leveled off with a peak burst over 440kb, yet my ping time in the game seems to have suffered and the only thing I did other than the tweak was install the beta gamespy3d . I will live though even with the total humiliation of analog modemers with a 375 ping killing with a much greater capacity as they have all learned to camp the corners and just shoot and then hide. I found that in some cases that if I just work the middle of the battlement then all of their predefined shots ring in the corners and then when it comes to the skillz , I still win most of the points. But in all honesty I must say that TFC will probably take a following hit if the rest of the lpb people don't acclimate. There is vastly becoming more cable connects and at a price that is within 2 or 3 dollars of the cost of a phone jack and a dialup account. Those are dynamic ip's but cable just the same. I enjoy 2 static ip's with cox@work and I am currently jacking them around about increasing my upstream. A 512k upstream would be better and is certainly a must with the cost I pay for the service. Lets face it > it is very difficult to fall from the platform that so many people have enjoyed by the honest attempt to even up the field. On the other hand the lpb people will acclimate to the situation and regain their position unless someone tampers further with the field. HPB is a thing of the past in the majority of the gaming world. Cable and dsl are spreading like wildfire. I think that there must be a great consideration in that and I also Know for a fact that the newer technology in the code rocks! I still have to deal with living in florida and playing on a server in San Diego : ) Thanks for the article > It should clear up alot of the minds therefore giving way to solutions and less bitching from the AP crowd. i.e. antipatch. Sincerely James Battles aka: IssacNewton

James I. Battles (2nd comment) Sunday, July 09, 2000 10:56 AM

I think everyone out their is getting deranged on the servers. I normally snipe but was playing engineer and was accused of spamming by one of the players for priming an emp grenade and flinging it up on the battlement. I told him maybe they should cut all grenades from the game because he was doing worse and I had said nothing. he uses a priming script and I don't use scripts . The other thing he did was plant detpipes in front of the respawn and set them off to keep anyone from getting out and lastly his priming script was so short until he would get like 5 people and himself with one mirv. After he accused me of spamming I asked what that was that he was doing and then told everyone good game and excused myself from play with the old "I have work to do" statement. His rebuttal to my asking if it was spam he did after my reply of removal of the grenades brought a response of we should have team kill on from him . I think the real answer comes with admin monitoring and a more stringent set of rules governing the removal therof: i.e. the trash "lol" Anyway >use it in the mailbag . Maybe people will wake up and see that besides it just being a game . It is a great game when played right and the grenades are part of it, however there should be a safe zone. I used to design a few binary space partitions in my spare time . I used that entity trigger_hurt I think it was and set it to like -,3000 health and put in front of the respawn and assigned it to the opposite team. I only extended it about 6 inches outside the door though so they could not get in as opposed to the turret Idea. maybe for that if they could speed the turret response in respawn. I guess my point is here that they have done everything they could to make it righteous. It goes with the same old saying guns don't kill people , I do! gamers don't scrap the project in general . The low res pixel nazis with their notepad ready to corrupt the code is another thing though. I had another idea. what if they made a transparent texture that would with a trigger_hurt to keep the neighbors out and make it a one way pass coming out . The only catch would be de-evolving by having to use team_assigned teleporters to get in. They might as well just use them with a random drop point out bound. The other team would discover them though and det camp the drop points. see my point ? No matter what you do the only thing that will make any difference whatsoever in the game is Hall Monitors hehe. Ok rant/ over, maybe it will bring an auto kick_bot to refferee the kids while they play.

Jordan Cohen Sunday, July 09, 2000 8:57 AM

. I just read the interview wih Yahn, and I am FINALLY relieved. Finally, I see that the company/people who made the new netcode agree with me. I visit the Counter-Strike forums very often, only to see low pingers constantly complaining, and everything else (that Yahn just contradicted). It seemed like that only me, and a few others, realised that low pingers still had the advantage. I just think that the other pingers can't stand the fact that high pingers now have the advantage.............I don't know, as a low pinger, I've just gotten better with this patch. Anyways, my question. It was stated by Yahn, and I have also noticed myself, that there is no lag compensation in HLDM, or for that matter, Opposing Force deathmatch. I used to play OpForDM a lot before the patch, but now that I'm so used to the lag compensation, I, well, can't really play them any more. So, anyways, is there any plan in the future to include support for lag compensation in HLDM and/or OpForDM?

George Di Lullo Sunday, July 09, 2000 12:09 PM

I am just wondering if valve plans to address the issue with the ati rage pro 128 video card that their latest patch has created... I have been to sirra and ati both on support levels regarding open gl and direct 3d options for half life...And to my surprise they simply point the finger at one another and combined offer little help other then to check for driver updates, which I have done about 70 times...Can someone please offer sollution???thanks

Eric Wiltshire Saturday, July 08, 2000 11:46 PM

As a LPB, I come down square on the side of the Anit-Netcode group. But perhaps not for the same reason. Here's a question to throw out there....If TFC2 had come out with Netcode, but they had left TFC alone, would everyone be complaining? My answer is no. I think that people would have expected the game to play differently, or at least not been so extremely opinionated about it. The fact that Valve changed a current game so completely leaves most of us with a bad taste in our mouths. It's okay to have a company come out with a bad game, but to have a company change a great game so radically and very arguably for the worse, is simply unacceptable. As for netcode being more fair: perhaps, but I spent a lot of money on a fast machine, and a fast connection. Before the patch, I at least could see what was happening. Now I don't know if what I'm looking at is real or part of some alternate-universe-lag-hell in which, I only think I'm pointing at the enemy. It's easy for HPBs to say hahaha, you don't have your advantage anymore, but thats not the point. Screwing up my game experience because of people through no fault of myself have slow machines and slow connections is just wrong. Would these same people like Valve as much if they optimized the netcode for people with 133mhz machines calling in on a 14.4 modem through an AOL account? I thought competition was not only about who was better, but who had the best equipment. Name me one sport that everyone has to use the exact same equipment and everyone isn't looking for the edge... In car racing, the engineers are trying to make the engines better than the competitors. In sports, it might be the clubs, the shoes, the racquets, etc, etc, etc. As for a solution? Lets take the sports analogy a bit farther..... There's the pros, and then there's the amateurs….