Demo problem

[nifrek]

Any idea why my demos would play stuttery even tho when I record them I have between 75-120fps at all time? It looks like frames are skipped about every second. If I stand still in front of rotating items like armor, they rotate very smoothly, so it seems to affect my movements only.

I can play other people demos fine on my computer, and I've sent my demos to other people and they stutter for them too.

I've tried installing Nexuiz and recording demos on a different HDD and same thing happens.

My comp:

Intel Core2duo 2gz (x2)
NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GS 256mb with latest drivers
2Gb of ram

I've tried the latest DP build, when I record a demo when playing locally (ie: starting Nexuiz and typing "map aggressor" in console) the demos come out fine. Demos recorded that way in previous build were stuttery too. Now it's only when I play on a server.

[:)]

Stuttery demos are a sign of a bad net connection usually, wouldn't have anything to do with fps or smooth animation.
I watched ftp://opteron.mshade.org/nexdemos/round ... l_rage.dem and it seemed like there were lost or unrecorded packets in the demo.

[nifrek]

Any idea how I can fix the "unrecorded packets" issue?

I just tried again playing/recording locally and even with latest build it's stuttery, just less noticeable.

[GreEn`mArine]

You can only make your demos smoother if you have a lot of upload bandwidth. The reason why you are lagging is because what you see in the demo is roughly the same thing that you do on the server. On the server, you do infact move that stutterly (for others), although it isn't that noticable from 3rd person perspective.

The thing is that you are sending x packets (containing your movement) to the server. The x is the same as the servers FPS. If the server runs at 20 FPS, you'll send 20 packets per second. But there is a multiplier variable that allows you to send e.g. 1.5x server-fps packets (in this case 30 packets), but as the packets themselves have a fixed size (in bytes) this also means that your upload bandwidth will be used more. I've set that variable from 1.0 to 3.0, this uses about 20 kb/s upload, definetely. But this makes my demos smoother. The name of the variable is cl_netinputpacketsperserverpacket .

The stuff I wrote above definetely is the case when you use cl_movement. If you don't have the bandwith to use this trick you can also try to not use cl_movement. You should also know that stuttering demos doesn't even necessarily have to do with the connection. Even when you are running a listenserver with an odd FPS number you can get choppy demos using cl_movement. Disabling cl_movement will most likely give you smooth demos, but probably a bad playing experience. Try it out.

[nifrek]

Thanks GreEn`mArine. cl_netinputpacketsperserverpacket had no effect, but it was indeed because of cl_movement. If it's set to 1 when I play, demos will stutter. I'm sure I tried that, but maybe I didn't after all. So this is unfortunate because I don't like playing without it So no demos for me I guess, that sucks I was planning to work on a few things that needs them, teamplay guides and stuff for nexuizninjaz...

It's weird tho, I mean my upload speed is capped at 70k/s so that's plenty. I'm gonna try playing with my router settings I guess.

Also I don't understand why this happens even when I'm playing locally.

Thanks for the help.

[nifrek]

Oh, seems like it's fixed. I don't remember if I tested it since I got the latest build but I think that's what might've fixed it. Yay!

Well if I watch a demo in slowmo I can still see a little stutter but at normal speed it's not really noticeable, unless I'm in denial (that's a possibility). So me = happy. I can now capture some frags.

[GreEn`mArine]

are you playing with cl_movement again ?