Lagging during Internet Game Play

[alfex]

LAGGING or JOINing issues when playing Multiplayer WI over the Internet

Definition: When a JOINing player's device cannot stay connected with the HOSTing player's device because of slow network connections.

Indicators: The player with the lagging problem sees “Network Lag” message on bottom of screen. Only the host and the other players can see the lagging player's name on the bottom of their screens. If lag is longer than 8 secs. the host is given the choice of knocking the lagging player off. I usually give a player 4 chances to find the lagging issue before kicking them off a game. The "kicked" player sees "Your connection has been severed".

HINTs:

1. Get closer to Wi-Fi (within 20 ft.) or Bluetooth (BT) (within 5 ft.) of your antenna.

2. Make sure your battery is over ¾ full or better yet, play in a charging device. Wi-Fi is much harder on the battery than BT. Pocket PC (PPC) is more prone to battery issues than Palms. You can play 1 or 2 games with a full battery usually before needing a charge.

3. Check ping time to the host system. To check this: Go to your home PC (For XP, Click on start / All Programs / Accessories / Command Prompt, then, in the Command Prompt (DOS) window, type in the words within quotes "ping www.blarg.com". Look at the "Average = xx ms" . If xx is more than 200ms then your connection to a Seattle host might be too slow. Blarg.com is our ISP. Causes: Keep reading.

4. Home network congestion. This can be caused by using peer-to-peer (music sharing) programs like Limewire, Kazaa or Morpheus. Also caused by internal virus on network or video conferencing.

5. Internet connection to your home is too slow. This is rarely the case. I have played against a 56k dial up modem just fine.

6. Geographic distance from host. Not much you can do about this, except get a better Internet connection or move closer to host .

7. Running two applications on the PDA simultaneously. Turn off any other apps you have running while playing Warfare Inc. This is especially true for the Pocket PC platform. This means screen savers, hacks and IM programs as well.

8. Run spyware detection program to clean out hard drive. This is for your desktop PC. Here is a link to a good program to help you; http://download.zonelabs.com/bin/free/cm/index5.html

[UGMC]

I was just looking at this from a long time ago, and wondered, do you have any clue what "error--out of sync" means?

[scottlu]

If you get a sync error, we'd like to know the circumstances so that we might be able to reproduce it. The more reproducible the better. Thanks.

[Verdagon]

I hate that bug. It happens like 50% of the time when I play. Usually it only happens when I'm playing, i've never heard of anyone else having it.

Maybe the appearance of the bug depends on the PDA...

[alfex]

Verdagon & Scottlu,

We have been HOSTing for a couple months now and have some experience with this problem as well. We have found that PPCs have more issues like the one Verdagon described when a Palm is HOSTing.

We think there is some issue with Palm OS vs. PPC OS when playing against each other. Only the PPCs seem to have the "severed" connection issues. Palms never seem to have this problem unless they have network issues which we usually can sort out. We have been playing with Verdagon (PPC/California) & Moveit(PPC/Arizona) many times. It is always Verdagon that gets severed at random times during a game. We only finish about 30% of the games we play with Verdagon because of this "severed" problem. We have lagging issues with other players, but hardly ever "severed" issues.

I hope we can figure this out.