Howdy!

After finally managing to get Nexuiz to work, and fiddling with the settings of Damn Small Nexuiz to squeeze a few more frames per second (hah, even did cl_particles 0 !), I finally was ready to logon to the servers and give Nexuiz a long awaited revisit.


Haha, yes I know it looks ugly! It doesn't matter to me, what's important is that I can play!

As I've mentioned to some of you, I'm in China. Internet speeds are ok domestically, but due to distance and the Great Firewall, the lowest ping I can manage when connected to an American Nexuiz server is 250...usually, though, the ping averages around 350.

At first, I didn't think about seriously playing with that kind of ping. I remember many years ago, in high school, I played Quake 2 over the net with 200 ping, and I found it incredibly difficult.

Anyway, I'm posting this because...I actually am playing Nexuiz regularly, despite the latency! But, to do so I had to come up with some tricks and strategies. Please forgive me if you are already familiar with how to play this way, or have dealt with slow connectivity in the past.

I'm an average player, my aim, weapon use, knowledge of the map and situational awareness are all sometimes good, othertimes laughable. Nonetheless, to stay average, I had to change the way I play:

1) Avoid Hitscan

Shotgun, nex, machine gun are almost useless. Sometimes if I happen to spawn right next to a Nex, I'll try to snipe someone, but basically I have a 10 percent chance, if that. The shotgun *can* work, either manual or burst fire, but it also is not very powerful. The machine gun can work as a finishing weapon: spray it in the vincinity of a weakened opponent. Mostly, though, these weapons should be avoided, because it's hard to hit people with them!

2) Avoid Rocket Launcher

Hitting people with it is quite difficult, even at close range. The rockets are slow and have too low a rate of fire. Even trying to right-click explode is often miscalculated.

3) Avoid "juggling"

Often the most talented Nexuiz players will "juggle" their opponents: use the laser/mortar to make their opponent airborn, then annihilate them as they float through the air. However, this strategy is counterproductive with high ping, because hitting an airborn opponent usually requires a hitscan weapon and low ping! Yes, I know some of you regularly hit people middair with the electro and mortar. Nonetheless, I would imagine your l33t shots would be hard to do at over 300 ping! So, keep you opponent on the ground, where's it's easier to do splash damage to them (e.g. using map surfaces such as the floor/wall etc.)

4) Use the Electro

This is your all purpose weapon. A great weapon in normal play, the electro is fabulous for high ping play. It has just enough speed that you can lead your opponents with some amount of accuracy. Also, it ideals splash damage, rewarding you for miscalculated shots. Don't leave home without it. Plus, if you're really desperate (e.g. ping spike!) you can just spam the right click fire and hope for the best!

5) Use the Mortar

This is your medium/long range weapon. Yes, it can be used up close, but generally it knocks your opponent around so much, it can be hard to land repeated hits (as stated above, an airborn target is much harder to hit). Also, you use it to knock your opponent around in order to make your escape.

6) Use the Crylink

This is your group weapon. It has a wide angle of fire, and yet also a relatively high rate of fire, making it effective at tackling clusters of opponents. Furthermore, it makes a great finishing weapon since you'll hit people more and with greater damage than with the machine gun. Only downside is it doesn't push your opponent around (like the electro and mortar do), which means your opponent can hit you easier.

7) Run

It's always a good idea to keep moving through the map in any first person shooter (e.g. getting the powerups/health/armor, being unpredictable etc.), but as a high ping player it's even *more* important. That's because, if you're staying in one general area, especially a tightly confined one, someone can come around a corner and shoot at you before you've even seen them on your screen!

8 ) Embrace your unpredictability

It's hard to hit people with high ping. However, it's also somewhat difficult for others to hit you. You will appear somewhat jerky, "out of sync", or otherwise unpredictable in relation to other "normal" low ping players. Keep this in the back of your mind, and if you realize a player is offput by you, try to get a sense of what actions are throwing them off. This takes some practice and depends on the server/situation/map, but certain strafe or movements patterns can really seem odd to others. Yes, this is somewhat of a guessing game, since you can't directly see what they are seeing on their screens. But, if done correctly, you can really start to irritate other players, especially if they are annihilating all the other low ping players, but can't seem to kill you despite your high ping! Heh, they don't call us HPB (high ping bastards) for nothing!

That's it! Not sure if this was helpful or not, but I thought I'd throw it up here.

Oh, and I want to once again thank Amoebios and Fruitiex, because without Damn Small Nexuiz I wouldn't be able to play at all on my clunker laptop. Thank you!!!

Thanks to antilag it should not be hard to hit people using hitscan weapons. Just aim at the people as if you had 0 ping and shoot.

Hey GreenMarine!

Are you saying you have played with high ping and had no problems? If you haven't, could you join a very "bad" (i.e. high ping) server and confirm this? I'm curious about this antilag feature. Anyway, perhaps my difficulties are due to some mysterious issue with this laptop (it is old) and not the server to client connection. I have no idea.

All I know is that it's quite tricky for me to hit people with hitscan weapons, whereas on my old computer/connection everything hit when it should.

I think antilag has a sort of upper limit onto how well it will function does it not? I think it probably only works up to about 200ms. I'm not sure about this though.

Heh, it's not a big deal whether or not I'm imagining this problem. The important thing is I'm having fun playing Nexuiz!

Hm, I could always try recording a demo of me in a server while using hitscan weapons, to see if that clarifies my problem (or just proves how bad my aim is )

Oh, and I had the idea to post this because players kept asking things like "How can you play with that ping?" and "That ping must suck" etc. etc. Just want to encourage those people with connection difficulties to make lemonade from a lemon.

For some time i used UMTS for playing aka around 200-300 ping with packetloss around 2-10%. Back then i did not like hitscan weapons very much. But antilag did go thru several improvements so maybe its better by now. In theory antilag should be capable to buffer up to 1.5 seconds (1500 ping) but thats really extreme.
IMO the main problem wait a high ping is that moving feels a bit weired and that it lowers your responsetime in general.

It is a quite useful for Chinese players. Thank you very much. In BJ, my ping to European servers are all about 300ms and US about 250 ms.

Yo Liberty! Cool to hear from another player in china. This reminds me how awesome a Chinese dedicated server would be. Sadly, I don't have the resources to set one up. *sigh* I can dream, can't I?

As for the hitscan weapons issue, I booted up the single player and played against some bots. Hitscan weapons worked just fine. So...yeah, maybe there is a threshold of latency where antilag just stops being effective.

EDIT: Oh sorry I didn't see your post, Esteel. Yeah, movement is a little frustrating at times...it's hard to hit the jumppads just the way you like (e.g. on evilspace, I find it fiendishly difficult to hit the mega jump pad to the nex/armor in the proper arc, I always have to adjust middair...something I only have to do 1 out of 10 times when I have low ping). Also, I find I commit suicide more often, just due to a ping spike and i walk off the map or suddenly appearing enemy which knocks me off the map.

Well if you are playing "single player" (only you vs bots) then you can use those commands to mimic ping and packetloss and test antilag quite theoreticly (in practice the ping and PL is more fluctuating)

Code: Select all

cl_netlocalping is "0" ["0"] lags local loopback connection by this much ping time (useful to play more fairly on your own server with people with higher pings)
cl_netpacketloss_receive is "0" ["0"] drops this percentage of incoming packets, useful for testing network protocol robustness (jerky movement, effects failing to start, sounds failing to play, etc)
cl_netpacketloss_send is "0" ["0"] drops this percentage of outgoing packets, useful for testing network protocol robustness (jerky movement, prediction errors, etc)

Esteel, brilliant suggestion! I didn't know about those commands.

I tested just using the first cvar, cl_netlocalping. Sure enough, around 200+ ping, I start to notice missed hits for hitscan (even when crosshair is dead accurate and following the target), and by 300+ ping, it feels pretty much like playing online. It isn't as bad (I think I have some amount of packet loss on some servers), but pretty close.

Esteel, when you try this test, do you have problems with hitscan? Or is my result unusual?

I have not tried in a while.. can't remember huge problems though..

Update:

After playing a week or so now using the above settings, I think I have to revise what I said about hitscan weapons.

Turns out if you treat the hitscan weapons *AS IF* they are not hitscan (i.e. you lead your target just a bit), you can use them effectively. I surprised myself (and my opponents) by racking up some nice Nex snipes keeping this in mind.

Oh, and I should mention I also get a fair amount of packet loss, which leads to even more "skipping" around (both me and my opponents). After playing for a while, though, you tend to get used to it: you actually do more guessing about where someone is rather than trying to pinpoint it exactly.

Nonetheless, I'd say about 60/70 percent of my hitscan shots miss, even when on my screen they seem they should hit.

It helps to fire at someone who is running straight away or straight towards you, since even with lag they'll still be in your line of fire.

Also, it really helps to get really talented with the secondary fire of the Electro and Mortar. If you can judge the situation and map correctly, spamming a load of electro pods and mortars can lead to some disastrious massacres. I see talented players using this technique occasionally, but it's not as that common. It *seems* easy, but I actually think to use it consistently and effectively takes just as much practice as the other weapons!

The ideal targets for electro pod/mortar spamming are multiple, distracted, and likely to remain in a general room/pit. Also, you usually have to hold your ground and fire steady from a single location (running/jumping about while firing usually makes it very difficult to predict where your delayed explosives will land), which leaves you more vulnerable. Furthermore, it involves a little more intuition/patience than more precise kills (e.g. all the other weapons).

Spamming in front of a heavily used teleportal, exit/entrance, or corner is another good tip.

At the very least, "laying a minefield" can distract your opponents (Watch your step! ) enough to let you kill them with another weapon.

tl;dr: Hitscan weapons aren't completely useless with 300+ ping. Also, electro/mortar spamming is an effective technique.