Official forums for BZFlag.org

Hello,
I'm having trouble with my connection.
It's the lag. It stays within the range of 60-150 with 40-60 jitter. I don't think It was always this way. I used to play this game about 4 to 6 months ago. My connection was still not the greatest, but it worked. Since then I've had no changes to my HW or Internet connection. My OS and SW have also remained virtually the same.
I'm attaching some work I did with ping and traceroute. I don't pretend to understand everything about either tool, but I tried to find what the bottleneck is exactly. I'm still not sure.
I'm running "BZFlag client 2.4.18.20190401-MAINT-linux-gnu-SDL2 (protocol 0221) http://BZFlag.org/" on Devuan (Debian) linux.
I tried restarting both my computer and my combo modem/router a TP-LINK TD-W9970.
My connection is rated for 8Mbs but it's normally half that.
All of my tests and playing were conducted without any other processes eating my Network B/W. I even went so far as to go into top and kill everything that would with the exeption of ntp (which I sent SIGSTOP to) and dhclient (because it configures my IP address and I'd need that).
My CPU is a hexacore and it's not over loaded; even the game doesn't eat 1 whole core. My GPU is an AMD 7770 GHz. It should be more then enough for bzflag.
If you need more information just ask.

Thanks!

Your ping looks very consistent, so perhaps your issue is not network related (unless it's an issue that only affects some kinds of traffic and not others). Can you share what framerate you get in the game, whether the framerate you get is consistent or varied, and what settings you have for energy saver if you have that turned on? Also, do you have high jitter in the game regardless of which server you connect to?

Are you trying to connect to European or US servers? US servers should have a lower ping for you.

Is your connection wired or wireless?

I'm using a wired connection. "Energy saver" is on performance (technically this is linux, so it's not the same thing as windows, but I can translate for you).
In game energy saver is off. Anti-aliasing is off.
I can't find a way to display the fps. But if I turn down the settings my ping is 54 and jitter is 45, so I might be pushing my GPU a bit, but that doesn't get me within what server admins require. (I think it was 15, max, but ask disco, he's the admin who brought this to my attention).
I'm uncertain which servers are in the US, I can't sort by ping time. I suppose I can use geolocation but that's a bit overkill to have to do for 100 or so servers.

Press the 't' key and wait a second, and you should see a small "FPS: " counter on the screen.

I have a server list that sorts by servers closer to you (based on GeoIP, so not super accurate but close enough in most cases): https://www.bzexcess.com/geolist/

Let's confirm that the graphics card is doing its job. The
glxinfo | grep rendering
command produces "direct rendering: Yes" when hardware graphics acceleration is working. If so, that isn't the problem.

Ok, I'm getting over 100fps at all times on every server I tested.
I connected to the closest server 1purplepanzer.mooo.com:4100 . I'm still getting 53 jitter which is really high. Too high for that server and, I'm sure, others.