[Archived] Online Gaming

[benhben]

I have decent broadband speed, 2mb/s i think. However when i try and play Return to castle wolfenstein multiplayer online its soo jerky and slow you cant make anything out. Im sure 2mb/s internet is a decent enough speed. Does anybody know what to do?

[Flopsy]

unfortunately I guess it might well be a "buy a new better computer" problem.

However before you go down that route (or if you already have) What pings are you getting on the server - i would say 80 or more is a tad high,

* ensure you're not downloading anything,

*check your spyware,

*switch your anti virus off,

*if you have norton firewall burn it and get zonealarm

*The server you might be connecting too might not be able to cope with the number of people on it

*Other high pingers may effect you're ping

*Have you tried any other games?

*Go to task manager and see how many items are running which you dont need (god bless google) there are a number of big memeory hoggers which might be an issue. For gods sake dont close explorer.exe

* See how much memory you have and defrag the hard drive

What it could be, which is what I've had recently is that it might just be your ISP being crap, I have an 8mb line and was getting download speeds of 35kbps last weekend.

go to www.speedtest.net and see what ping and download speed you are.

Good luck

[Flopsy]

Oh if its running Punkbuster, have a look at the forums and see about changing the update timings - it was a big problem on BF2 until i worked out how to change it

[benhben]

Right ive done that internet speed test thing. My internet speed came out as 1868kb/s download, 230kb/s upload. My latency was 50ms (is that ping? and i have no idea what ping is), my server was maidenhead and its 150 miles away. Im on a brand new pc with a decent graphics card that plays the game smoothly at a resolution of at least 1280-800 or whatever it is and my desktop is atuomatically set at 1680-1050. Surely these specs should be good enough to play the game smoothly. Whats going wrong??

Also I have tried messing with the game setting and there is no difference between high detail and resolution and the lowest. Still soo jerky its impossible to do anything. Even the mouse is jerky and hard to control on the in game menu screen. Single players runs so smoothly though.

Also what the hell is punkbuster? I went on their website but still couldnt see what it was.

[Flopsy]

Ping is the time taken for data to be sent from your machine to the server and back again so 50ms's find

try running it a low res, also ensure that any anti-aliasing is switched off

I dont know what graphics cars you have or what memory, but you might want to see what processes you've got running in task manager.

Punkbuster is anticheat/anti hack software which looks throught your game files for any hacks or cheats.

No idea, do you get any of the same with other games?

[benhben]

I havent tried. ive got Call of Duty but i lost the manual with the serial code and i couldnt use a copied serial key online. My PC and graphics are easily good enough to play the game in high detail, but even on low detail multiplayer is still full of lag. Wolfenstein is a fairly old game, and I dont think our wireless router is the best. I reckon it could be due to the router.

On another note, does anybody have sky broadband. There offering up to 8mb/s for less cost than our 2mb/s AOL broadband.

[LeChuck]

On another note, does anybody have sky broadband. There offering up to 8mb/s for less cost than our 2mb/s AOL broadband.

I had Sky and never had a problem with it, although I've heard it can be a little slow to set up, but I never had that problem.

To be honest, anything will be an improvement on AOL.

[thebigguy]

I had Sky and never had a problem with it, although I've heard it can be a little slow to set up, but I never had that problem.

To be honest, anything will be an improvement on AOL.

ive had aol for some time now and never had any problems with them if you get away from there softare then they are a good ISP which i have done and gottern aay from there software.

I use a router so router connects to them so dont need to use software to get on . Also they have a dailer which u can use instead off full software to get on

[Flopsy]

just switched from AOL to orange, mainly because I can get the same speed and a wireless router for £20 less.

[James No. 7]

I have decent broadband speed, 2mb/s i think. However when i try and play Return to castle wolfenstein multiplayer online its soo jerky and slow you cant make anything out. Im sure 2mb/s internet is a decent enough speed. Does anybody know what to do?

I found this, which may or may not answer your problem:

The multiplayer mode's other problems are technical. Like Unreal Championship before it, Return to Castle Wolfenstein can suffer from some pretty awful lag when you're connected to a bad server. As of this writing, the bad servers seemed to outnumber the good, lag-free servers, but as most things go with online games, this could change at any time. Suffice it to say that it's definitely possible to find a smooth, perfectly playable server, but don't expect to find one terribly often using the quick match option. Careful filtering with optimatch is the easiest way to find servers that are fast and full. <Source>