High Choke?

[-Mess]

In our server we run SourceMod, with gg5 and we've noticed the choke goes up & down while playing. this rarely happened when we didn't have GG5 on the server so I'm posting this to ask if anyone could help me figure out what It could be.

Thanks for any reply's in advance.

[scso1502]

We have been running Gungame5 since it came out and know all to well the choke you're referring to. Gungames are very fast action and are extremely demanding on servers and clients alike. They need a lot of network bandwidth and server CPU. I think you will be hard-pressed to find a single Gungame server that doesn't have any choke, especially Gungame version 5. But they are several ways to reduce it.

- First of all, forget running a public server at anymore than 66-tick. Contrary to all the hype you read from newbs that say anything less than 100-tick is lame, 100-tick is totally over-rated and will offer no better gameplay in Public servers with more than 12 people. In fact, you will experience choke in almost every 100-tick pub server you play on if it isn't set up correctly and there is no rate management of the players. Regardless of what type of server you run, you will almost certainly see some choke and tickrate drop in standard dedicated servers with more than 10-12 players in them when set to 100-tick. 100-tick servers are extremely taxing on game-server boxes and clients alike, and are totally unnecessary when it comes to Public servers. Running a Gungame server at 100-tick is begging for wasted CPU, wasted bandwidth and will make it impossible to eliminate choke or establish smooth gameplay. After running countless servers and selling them for years, I assure you this is correct.

- Run no more than 24 player slots in a GunGame server. With the amount of action going on in Gungame servers, especially while Deathmatch mode, choke is simply going to happen because of the massive amounts of data being sent to and from the server and clients while the game's going on. The action is non-stop and the server and clients need to constantly update everything between them in order for the game to smooth. The best way to reduce choke and stabilize the in/out speeds of your game client is to set your server and clients rates properly, and to make sure others in the game do the same with their clients as well.

For 66-tick Gungame servers, I recommend the following settings in your server.cfg:

//SERVER RATE SETTINGS - Changing these settings could screw up your server and cause lag!
sv_lan 0
sv_unlag 1
sv_maxunlag .5
sv_minrate 25000
sv_maxrate 40000
sv_minupdaterate 33 - USE 33 FOR 66-TICK or 101 for 100-TICK
sv_maxupdaterate 66 -USE 66 FOR 66-TICK or 101 for 100-TICK
sv_mincmdrate 33 - USE 33 FOR 66-TICK or 101 for 100-TICK
sv_maxcmdrate 66 - USE 66 FOR 66-TICK or 101 for 100-TICK
sv_client_cmdrate_difference 1
sv_client_predict 1
sv_client_interpolate 1
sv_client_min_interp_ratio -1
sv_client_max_interp_ratio -1

Note the rate is at 40000. This is beyond what the Valve documentation says a server can do, but I can attest to you that it does in fact work, and quite well at that. This made a huge difference for players when they used that setting on their servers and clients.It was the single biggest improvement we discovered. Once you have the above settings in your server's main config (cstrike/cfg/server.cfg) then restart the box and have your clients use the following client rate settings in their console:

cl_updaterate 66
cl_cmdrate 66
rate 40000

There is one more very important setting to verify on the client player's PC, and that is the STEAM Client's Download Setting. Having that set too low will cause all sorts of rate and lag problems in any server you play in. To verify this setting, do this:

Right-click on your STEAM icon in the lower right corner of your screen and select "Settings". Choose "Downloads" and set the Internet Speed to "Cable/Fiber > 10M". Try that setting and if your game runs smooth, leave it at that. If not, try backing it down one setting at a time until it feels right. This helps nearly everyone who tries it.

The above settings drop the choke for clients dramatically and the overall gameplay should become far better for all players when they use these settings. Just make sure all the players use them as much as possible. The more they do, the better the play is for everyone in the server.

Best of luck to you!
Mike Vail
BOOM! Lt. Maverick
http://www.boomgaming.net

[-Mess]

Oh yeah I know we have a dedicated box and we do, & have run many diffrent Source Engine games. And we don't run any of the source game servers we have over 66tic.

And yes our gungame server is a 24 slot 25 if you count a hidden reserved slot. But the choke doesn't seem to be as bad as when I first wrote this the only thing I did was switch to Eventscripts v2.0.0.250i and It seemed to had made a difference. And the rates on our server a basically the same to what you wrote down except the maxrate.

Thanks for the SUPER large reply hopefully this wont only be helpful to me but others as well.