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Allright! Where's
The Cool Music?
Been Taunted?
Click the TauntMaster
Meet the NO Squad's
Sister Squadron! |
I've found that a great fix for the warp we all experience in the online gaming environment, at least it helped me reduce most of my warp problems. Windows 98 is very finicky when it comes to third party software that attempts to alter the operating environment Windows 98 has established. I've tried quite a few third party MTU(maximum transfer unit a.k.a. your packet size) size adjusters and while they do the job they were intended to do, they just seemed to abnormally slow down the ability for Win98 to send clean unfragmented packets. If your not sure what a fragmented packet does I'll try to explain it the best I can. The main thing linking your computer to the online world is a software driver called a Dial Up Adapter. It interfaces with the modem and controls your packet size and how fast your packets are transmitted. When a fragmented packet is received by your computer it floats around in the FIFO Buffers until the rest of the packet is received at which point your computer puts the packet back together and translates it to your screen. Unfortunately while this packet is floating around waiting for the rest of itself to show up, the packets transmitted behind it are building up in the FIFO Buffers as well. What happens next we have all experienced, a huge burst of gunfire that rips you into a million pieces while the guy that shot you is still in your sights and no, Hurricanes don't have a rear gunner as it would appear. Not a bad idea though.Now before all you techies get in an uproar, I'm trying to keep this as simple as possible. Obviously, there is a lot more to the process than what I just described, in fact I have a notebook full of white papers that have been published by various authors all over the net. If anyone would like copies, I would be more than happy to send you some. In my opinion your connection is the key to how well you will fly as a pilot in relation to online combat. Anyway, getting back to the subject, third party software in my experience has not benefited Win98 in the ways it was able to benefit it predecessor Win95. The best performance I've obtained has been using the built in adjustment capability Win98 comes standard with. Win98 has the ability to adjust the packet size now, Win95 did not have this feature. The default settings are set to automatic which works wonderful for web surfing but translates into a nightmare in an online game. With the advent of the 56k modem it has gotten worse. 56k modems rely heavily on software compression to obtain their speeds and if you know anything about online games, software compression equals warp in the game. The more compression you have the larger your warp will be in the game, not to mention the extra strain it puts on your CPU to process the compression commands given it by the modem.Ultimately,you can do what I've done in the past which is to run two modems, a 56k for surfing and a 28.8 for gaming. this works exceptionally well but uses up valuable IRQ's and Memory Addresses. The alternative is a simple thing that anyone can do if you follow the steps outlined below. Please read the entire process before you start and if you don't understand something then don't attempt to do it. Email me and we can set up a meet on ICQ or at CFS itself and I can walk you through it.
One side note: I have noticed that when the value is set to small, large web pages with lots of graphics will load slower. To fix this you will need to set the value back to automatic following the steps above. This is the only bad side effect I've encountered so far and to me it's worth the trade off of having to adjust the value and reboot to the advantages I gain playing the game online. I hope this will help some of you that are having connection problems in the game For Windows 95 users there are tons of programs on the net that will adjust the MTU settings for you and they generally all work fine. KARMA
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WINDOWS 98 MTU
SETTINGS