LAG A Must read for all C4 Pilots

[Redhawk]

In this post I will discuss the protocol used for most online gaming. I will discuss some of the anomolies some players have been talking about. Some have been convinced they are cheats, but since I have no evidence of this, I can only see it as a lag anomoly. There are plenty of bugs in all software, some developers support and update their products, NovaLogic does not. What other software development company do you know of which has not updated a game in years and allowed several well publicized bugs to carry on for so long?

I have news for you!
Have you ever shot someone and filled them full of lead and saw black smoke coming off their comanche, yet they never blew up? When you ask them afterwards, "any damage" and they say "no". Are they liars? Cheaters? or is this also one of the several anomolies of Comanche 4? The latter question holds true. For this same reason, on the other hand he or you could just see or hear 1 stinger and boom you or him is dead? Yes indeed this could happen. Would he then say "wt*&#?" or should he say "you chea___ as__le!!!! $%^&#*@" !!! Some Comanche 4 players are like little old ladies, they dream a lot of stuff up and to soothe their fragile EGOs and lack of sportsmanship, they chalk it up as a cheat. You're then losing potential friends and causing a stink in a game you are supposed to be enjoying.

Who can you blame for this?
Well how about NovaLogic for starters?
Did you ever wonder why the stingers creates no damage? Hmmmm think a bit more.

I'm going to explain a few things here, It will make you feel better about the game, yourself, and perhaps those you have come to dislike so much.

TCP/IP and its udp layer, is the protocol of choice for online gaming. You will soon see that 3/4 of the anomolies you see in any online game are easy to understand, especially if the coding was ify at best and it was never updated to fix the many bugs.

It takes 3 rounds to down a player flying in 3h.

Most people have not studied the effects of connection latency with regard to you weapons. Just because you see your opponent in front of you at the specified angle and time that you see him, does not mean that this is precisely where he is.

Ping time dominates your ability in this game where you are always suffering lag. Lag is forever present, although you may think you are playing in real time, you are not. Whether you are pinging the server at 30ms or 300ms, this is lag and it is there for all at some degree or another. More often than not! It is just more noticable at times.

You must adjust your weapon path according to the angle of the enemy, but also according to the lag. You have surely noticed that there are times when you are shooting a guy yet he doesn't blow up, or it requires way more stingers than it should. This is due to lag.

TCP/IP/UDP:

C4 uses the UDP protocol on port 17300,This is a very fast and efficient way to send data, provided that the data's integrity is not crucial. For this reason, it is well suited for online gaming and for streaming media.

When you connect to a C4 server, you are not actually making a permanent connection, this is not possible while using UDP. Instead you are sending and receiving several mini data pulses each time your data is sent and received from and by the server which is then transmitted to all players by the server in question.

UDP is an unreliable service...delivery and duplicate detection is not guaranteed. It doesn't use acknowlegements (ACKs), it does not control the order of arrival, it has no flow control and no error correction. UDP data can be lost, and you see this all the time when playing C4 every time a player freezes, or warps and lags. However, it is the protocol which allows for smooth gameplay for most games, especially speed and action games.

Think about it for a second and it will all make sense to you. 14 or more players are playing on different computer configurations and speeds, from all corners of the globe, all on different network nodes and backbones and connected at various speeds ranging from dialup 33.6 to 10Megabit Ethernet lines in Sweden (lucky rascals. Isn't it amazing that we can play at all?

I always laugh when someone tells me "impossible, I can't lag, I'm on a T1" OR "I'm on DSL, or cable I don't lag"...Hahahahahahah! BullCookies! Anyone who makes such a statement is ignorant about the technology that makes up the internet and networking in general.

Your bandwidth pipe has nothing to do with lag at any time. You can lag no matter how large your connection is. And I have explained why, but I will elaborate a bit more so that it is crystal clear for some of you.

Latency, LAG explained:
When you connect to a game server, you are not directly connected to it at all. You aren't connected directly to any user on the internet. Therefore, you will always pass through several other nodes, nodes are networked computers, in this case, they are routers. Think of a router as a computer which processes nothing other than traffic, "A Traffic Cop". That's all a router does, it directs traffic to the next router and so on and so on and so on until it reaches the last router in the chain and finally directs your data to the destination IP which is bound to the machine you are attempting to communicate with. (each router you are traversing is called a HOP) If you run a trace to the IP you are trying to contact, you will see each router (HOP) which is passing your data along. Some of these routers are experiencing extremely high amounts of traffic constantly, I'm talking huge amounts of data at all times. This high traffic flow will slow them down a little, each time you hit a congested route, your ping time (lag) increases.

You might find this link <http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/casa/martin/atlas/more_isp_maps.html> of interest to you.

Typically, to reach a given game online you are passing through anywhere from 8 to 20 routers until you reach the game. Along the way, some of them may be very congested, your data could slow down or in the worst case scenario, your data could get lost completely and never reach its destination, especially when using the UDP protocol. Thus CI's. CI's are not neccessarily and in most cases aren't the server unless all players experience them at the same time.

Continued...

_________________

[Redhawk]

Lag continued..

Online games don't require high bandwidth or a large pipe. I proved this when explaining the UDP layer. The amount of data sent and received in C4 is tiny, very small and typically bursts of 100 to 800 bytes per packet.

Guess what happens when you drop these little data packets? Dropping packets means your data got lost along the way to the server or on the way back to you. Yep, you guessed it, for that brief moment, your comanche just lagged. Some silly players like to artificially stall their connections purposely. How do they do it? Well there are numerous ways to do it. The most common abuse would be the "Print Screen" key. What happens when a player presses and holds his or her Print Screen key? Well you guessed it, while the user presses Print Screen, his computer is busy capturing the screen into a buffer. While he/she is doing this, the PC is using all of its energy to capture the screen into a memory buffer thus causing all network traffic to halt for the duration. Hence he/she warps accross your screen and he/she is impossible to follow or shoot down. This could also be called CPU lag since the CPU on the PC cannot work fast enough to keep the data flowing due to the fact that it has become busy with another task. Since the UDP protocol does not acknowlege receipt and makes no guarantee of data integrity, you will see all sorts of strange stuff from time to time. Most of the time, it is due to a lousy internet connection. If your data stalls for more than a few seconds, you will timeout and lose connection. The game coding is setup to remove you from the game after a predefined period of time without communication.

Getting back to ping times, or connection latency/ lag.
As explained, your bandwidth has nothing to do with it. Proof of this is that the game plays very adequately on a 56K modem. I don't care if you are playing on a shared T3 from your college dormroom. You will still have lag, and in some cases you will lag even more on this type of connection because there is usually a ton of traffic and obstacles within your university network which can and will hinder your online gaming performance. Just because you can send me a 10 meg file at 500K/sec with lightning performance using TCP, does not mean you will have a good UDP stream in C4 or any other online game. Think of your connection as water flowing through a pipe. You can have a huge pipe but not much pressure behind it, or you can have a smaller pipe with a lot of pressure. Your data will flow well once it is moving but could take longer to reach your glass. Ultimately, if you have high pressure, no matter how big or small your pipe is, your glass will fill up quickly since C4 is the size of a shot glass
Ping is pressure...this pressure is what you need most for gaming.

The most important aspect of your internet connection when it comes to gaming is PING <http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/p/ping.htm>. The time it takes for you to send a data packet to a given location and receive an acknowlegement of its receipt.

Typically, cable users have an advantage over DSL for online gaming. Why would that be? Simple, most cable users have much lower ping times to any given host than the ADSL users.

A typical cable user will ping a game server at anywhere from 30ms (milliseconds) to 80ms...whereas the DSL user will be at between 90ms and 150ms and a dialup user on 56K will ping at 130ms to 300ms or more. So think about it! that's quite a difference between the three. These numbers can be very crucial to C4 players, where the object of the game is to see the opponent and shoot him/her before he/she sees and shoots you. That extra time (although very brief) is all you need to have the dominant edge over your opponent provided you have good reaction time and your brain has a good ping time
Connection Tweaking Utilities:
All of these intenet connection tweakers that promise 200% or more improvement in speed are liars. You are wasting your money completely if you buy them. Furthermore, they are useless for online gaming. No amount of registry tweaking will reduce your ping times. These tweaks will somewhat improve your bandwidth if tested and configured correctly, but they will never improve your gaming ability in terms of connection to servers. Nor will they improve your ping rate. <http://www.dslreports.com> has some online tools that are free and are amongst the best for this purpose. Their DrTCP.exe <http://www.dslreports.com/drtcp> is very good. You'll have to read all about it in order to have any measurable success, but it may or may not be worth your while. Don't spend money on this stuff, the best is free go figure.

Slow ping = lag
Dropping/losing UDP data packets = lag and warp
Stalling connection...UDP data loss for 5 seconds = mega warp across the screen which eventually leads to timeout.

A good 56K connection is all you need to enjoy C4. A good dialup ISP will provide you with a 50K connection (provided your phone lines are direct and clean) and your Pings will normally be between 130ms and 260ms depending on how well your ISP is integrated within the Internet. But remember, a cable user with a ping of 50ms against a 56K user's 200ms Ping? The cable user's missiles will lock onto you very hard, and you will have to pull twice as hard to escape them. Conversely, your missile shot to a cable user will be very easy for him to dodge and he will not lose as much speed as you will. This is all subjective of course, in practice this is the rule of thumb and usually holds true.

If you want to have an advantage and smooth game play? Do some research on your available ISPs, this is the single most important factor and it's not usually within your control. How well is your ISP connected within the internet infrastructure? Is it very near or directly connected to a backbone? These are all questions you need to have answered if you have more than one ISP available to you in your area.

In Closing:
Half of the mysterious cheats some of you refer to? They are not cheats at all...LAG...people.

Study the IT field, specifically the TCP/IP protocol and its UDP layer, think about all of the variables involved in online gaming and you will see how miraculous it is that we can play at all.

Enjoy the game as best you can, but most importantly...try to remember what you read here, it will explain what you see.

I hope this has proven useful to you and that you now have a better understanding.

Hoping that the subject is clearer now for better understanding what it is all about Cheating and Big Mouth.

Last thing. If you ever see this happen, when you are deeply concentrating in a pursuit, in Nova C4 rooms, dont panic.

Stay cool, close the game. Go take a walk and breathe some fresh air.

After a while it will pass you.
DoggieDaddy*CFS*

[XC4Pilot]

LMAO!!!!! Is that what they call it now? "LAG"? Edited: I will never....ever... again mention a squad's name in an accusatory manner in these forums - or I will be banned by name and IP...

If anyone believes all this, I have a snowshovel store in Florida I would like to sell you....

Sell whatever you want... but if I ever find this tone of voice in these forums from you again - you won't be welcome here. Thank you.

Bluetiereign.

[james-uk]

Now we understand lag.

How would do u explain getting killed with 3 or 4 bursts of cannon fire on full health.

Long range stingers I have heard the DEF files can be edited to create a longer "ARM" range making it possible to detect heat from a further range (dont explain passive i understand it fully) Would u say these are lag. Does cabling exist or is it a myth. ? The way i book it some players just cant resist medalling.

regards james-uk-

[Redhawk]

James-UK
read the second paragraph in the second post and you will see it says some folks do intentionally cause lag. and whether it's screen printing or so called cabling (I won't define it as some may endever to do it) and you already know what it is, is still lag. anytime there is an interuption in sending data the terminology is lag. Call it what you want.

[Reaper]

Interesting thread Red Hawk. You make some good points.

As a someone who played C4 for almost a year as a dial up, then a few more on cable. I have seen both sides of this. I have also served more games than I could count.

About the 56k against broad band players, Hate to say it but dial ups lag the game big time. To the point they affect the game play.

When I was hosting a lot I could tell when the players were dial ups. Theres that much lag. Also a slower connection has more time to drop packets.

I know players do cheat in C4 as they do on every other online game. Some times Lag could make a player seem like there cheating, But either way Lag doesn't explain all the stuff that happens in C4.

Since James asked about the def files. I'll answer a little about that. Some of the settings are server side, others are player side. You asked about the heat range, The problem with the idea that a player turned up the heat range is it's already longer than most players think. If a player is cheating heat range is not how they are doing it. But there are enough other things they can do.

I also play the other games Nova built on this game engine. C4 has the worst net code of the 3. The bright side is it never had the number of players the other games do. So there are fewer players to hack it.

There are such a low number of players still playing C4, This is a mute point now. No matter how much you like C4 the game has seen it's best days. New players don't stand a chance in the game, Most will not stay around long enough to learn to play.

Enjoy the game while you can, This is as good as it will get.

[Charger]

LMAO!!!!! Is that what they call it now? "LAG"? Is it just "coincidence" that a *** pilot was the one to post all this rubish?

If anyone believes all this, I have a snowshovel store in Florida I would like to sell you....

You should keep the derogatory comments down since he was only expressing a well known fact for any game. Lags been an issue since the dawn of the internet. I think he was just trying to share some knowledge with us.

[nakulak]

as usual, I agree with reaper.

- anyone who has ever fired passives at a remote farp that is way beyond radar knows 2 things: its hard even for the best players to know if someone is invis, but also, by chance you may have seen the stingers hone in on a moving target too. yes, the heat seek works very far off.

- I know that the math says that dialups can play, but for whatever reason what reaper said is right on the money. It may be because the companies that run dialup services have crappy routers on the ancient equipment, or it may be that there is a math error, but in any case, the game often slows down considerably for the higher speed players. The proof is in the pudding. Although as doggie pointed out, since the packets are presumably non-synchronous (UDP), why the game slows down to let dialup connections makes little sense, but as reaper said and I'm sure many can attest to, it simply does. It slows down just like someone with a high ping came in the game.

other than that, I applaud the intent of your article doggie. I have tried many times and failed miserably to convince others that most of the crazy stuff is lag. And like reaper said, the game isn't cheat proof. But I still believe that most of the guys are cheat free, and that makes the game a lot of fun. I'm 47 and to this day I don't understand the mindset of anyone wanting to ever cheat at anything - whether its moving a golfball, corking a bat, fouling a player, calling foul when there is none, bringing home fish that are smaller than the creel size, bringing home female crabs, or cheating at an online game. To me, its only fun if I know its even-steven, and anything else is just so completely lame that it boggles my mind as to what the point is.

[Redhawk]

I agree,
I too think that most pilots are straight, and I do think the cheaters are fewer than many try to make out. One thing I've learned in this game and F-22 L3 that the better a pilot gets the more often he is called a cheat. I think it's an ego thing. I also have seen in my server some dialup come in and really lag the game. And I have also played against some very good dialup connected pilots that caused very little lag. I think the problem is like you said the isp having poor and outdated equipment. I will say that F-22 Lightening 3 run very smooth on dialup and wonder why Nova couldn't make C4 run as smooth.

[OhNo]

Thanks for explaining why I was a cheater. Very well said better late than never Don't feel bad Redhawk I have been called a lier for things I have seen in the game your cool with me

Glad to see you OLE TIMERS still kicking. Reap and Wiper how is it going? Sure miss gaming with you buggers

[kill_me{FWD}]

hey doggiedaddy,

tx for the post. even if it comes for c4 late, it is still an enrichment for all other current games.

[nakulak]

hey ohno, where you been hiding ? a little fly on the wall told me you play now and then, but I never see you ! you must have a new secret alias ! lol

[OhNo]

hey ohno, where you been hiding ? a little fly on the wall told me you play now and then, but I never see you ! you must have a new secret alias ! lol

If I ever see you Bud i will let you know it is me

[RAB]

I've known *** and their pilots from the day they started the squad. I will admit that I don't agree with the tactics some of there pilots use but as for out right cheating I disagree. And I'm sure if you had any actual proof of what you were saying you wouldnt hide behind the name of XC4Pilot. Maybe use the name that everybody knew you by in the game. That's if you were man enough to. Or you can keep hiding behind a new name and talk trash. You sound like a coward to me. I'm sure your mother would be proud.

Now don't think I'm totally naive. It is true, unfortunatly, that any game out there has it's fair share of cheats and hacks. Including C4. Matter of fact I know of a certain C4 pilot that doesn't fly anymore (at least under the name he is known by), that has been digging around in the DEF files for C4. Kind a makes you wonder now doesn't it X C4PILOT. Could it be that that you and him are one and the same. But being a coward I'm sure you would never admit to it anyway.

Hey OHNO. If you playing again. Maybe we could get a few of the old timers together and fly a few rounds. I'd be more than happy to dust off my C4 server, Let a few people in and lock the door behind us. I'm sure Reaper would. Nak what about you. Are you game for a game. From what I understand Bluetiereign used to fly, Although that was before my time. Maybe you would like to dust off the ole joystick for a couple maps. Anyway just a thought.

[nakulak]

been kinda busy and not much flying rightnow rab, but I'd love to sometime, gimme a hollar (maybe in a couple weeks or so ) !