In game choke

[Balaso]

If you are experiencing high in game choke, it may cause problems with your shots being registered correctly by the server. If you are, here is some info that may prove useful.


There are three main settings to look at on the client-side. These are rate, cl_updaterate, and cl_cmdrate.

rate determines the speed, in bytes per second, that your client allows itself and the server to interact at. This setting is needed because your client has no idea how fast your connection is, and it doesn't know how to find out. The rate setting tells it the maximum speed at which it can transfer data. If it is set too high, your connection may not be able to handle it, and you will get packetloss; if it is set too low, choke and latency will increase, possibly making your game stutter or lag. Half-life is generally able to compensate for choke fairly well, as long as there is not much of it; however, when choke gets too high (over 100), it has to start dropping packets (and we all know how bad packetloss is!). I recommend a rate of 8000 or 10000, since most broadband connections can easily handle it (try 10000 first).

cl_updaterate determines how many updates per second the client will accept when it is interacting with the server. A higher value can make gameplay more smooth, although it often makes your ping appear higher due to the added latencies on both ends from extra calculations involved. I recommend a cl_updaterate of 40, which I have found balances ping and smoothness fairly well. Feel free to try higher and lower values. A value too high can cause choke if your machine or your connection can't handle all the packets; a high value can also make your ping look much higher than it should be. Some people blindly set this variable to 101 -- that would be an example of a too-high value.

cl_cmdrate determines how many commands your client sends to the server per second (such as moving, turning, jumping). I usually recommend that users set their cl_cmdrate cvar to the same value as cl_updaterate, because they are so similar. Too-high or too-low values (like 101) may lead to the infamous "shots not registering" problem and high values can also cause high in-game pings.

I hope the info is useful to some of you, I think it will help me some.

-B