ET This fixed my network/input lag-weirdness

[bubblehash]

Hey dudes -

 

Ever since the COVID stuff started, I've been convinced something felt...different when I played ET. It didn't really make sense either. I just built a new PC, upgraded internet, new router, stable ping, blah blah blah. No matter what I did, aiming and shooting with smg's never seemed smooth enough. It's hard to explain...but you kinda just know how it's supposed to feel when you're aiming at someone's face and you click to shoot. That's gotta make sense to the other people that have been playing this game for 15 years. Your brain knows the timing between clicking the mouse and what your eyeballs should be seeing  

 

I did all kinds of crazy stuff in my hunt for the lag, but I finally gave up and just watched packets in wireshark for longer than I'd like to admit. What I noticed was that my network was noisy as hell. That didn't make a lot of sense either. I play at night when no one's really watching anything. I've got a wired connection on my desktop, so it definitely jumped out at me when I kept seeing the names of dozen wireless devices show up in wireshark. From there I went down a rabbit hole of stamping out unwanted interrupts on my nic/cpu. Once I got to about 30 tabs open in chrome, I realized that I had done all the same stuff I was seeing on my XP box a decade ago to achieve the same goals.

 

What I did only really works because I don't need my home desktop for work stuff. Windows 10 just kind of assumes your computer MUST be part of a heavily inter-connected enterprise network for whatever reason. That ends up leading to all kinds of things constantly talking back and forth on the network. It's not enough to slow you down when you're doing daily life computer stuff, but it's stealing milliseconds constantly. I figured those little bits of time could definitely be messing with the mouse click -> hit sound -> recoil shake -> enemy muzzle flash -> damage shake flow that felt off. 

 

Be careful doing some of this stuff if your network traffic is more important than browsing/ET. If you're on WiFi, some of it might still help, but I don't know.

 

Step 1) Build a fence so your neighbors know you don't like them

 

Open up the old school looking firewall management tool. Hit your windows key and start searching for Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security. It's one of those apps that's too complicated to update to the fancy UI. We're not going to mess with the rules, we just want to start building a fence around our PC.

 

Right click on the root Windows Defender Firewall... item on the left and go to properties

 

 

Do the following for all 3 network profiles at the top unless you know which one you're using: Domain, Private, Public. Note, this is where we start to make our PC less friendly to other devices, so be careful if you care about talking to other devices in your house in a healthy way.

 

Click on the Customize button for Settings

 

 

Select No for Allow unicast response then click OK

 

 

2) Tell your neighbors to piss off and never talk to them again

 

Open up Control Panel. Make sure it's not that new Settings app or whatever.  Assuming you've got the default view layout, click on Network and Internet.

 

 

Click on Network and Sharing Center

 

 

Click on Change advanced sharing settings on the left.

 

 

We want to turn off network discovery for Private and Guest/Public. I also turned off file and printer sharing since I don't need them. This is another thing that you probably don't want to do if you need to get to your desktop from another place in your house for whatever reason.

 

 

 

Then expand All Networks and turn off Public folder sharing

 

 

Save changes to go back to the Network and Sharing Center. Now click on your active adapter.

 

 

Click Properties

 

 

Turn off all the stuff you don't need unless your PC needs to talk to other PCs. Like I said before, I only really need browsing/ET type networking from my desktop and those still work great. Ignore the Npcap entry, that's something you'll only have if you've installed packet analysis software.

 

 

 

I only need my computer for the network traffic I generate, so I only want IPv4 and IPv6 enabled on my desktop.

 

Click OK and restart your computer.

 

Step 3) Hopefully get some headshots before you die now

 

No screenshots here because it's late, but my lagometer hasn't moved since doing this a few days ago and it feels like there's a direct connection between my hands, mouse, keyboard, and eyeballs again.

 

I was always convinced that it felt better playing on my old college computer than anything recent, and this kind of network stuff getting in the way might make sense. ET is an old game, It doesn't care about bandwidth. It only really cares about latency. Our home connections are a hell of a lot "faster" now, but all those new things Windows keeps adding mean I don't really have a dedicated gaming box by default. It definitely feels like I've got that now.

[GHARIB]

Hey Mate!

 

I had the same problem few months ago, and fixed it mainly with disabling Netwok discovery

 

I took screenshots of network traffic with network discovery enabled, and disabled (it will show how what you explained is SO true )

 

Protocol QUAKE3 is for enemy territory frames

Protocol SSPD is for Network discovery frames

 

WIth SSPD SERVICE enabled (network discovery service) i got spikes of ping (SPIKES OF PING = LAGS)

 

You can see that almost every Enemy Territory frame (QUAKE3), there is somes SSDP FRAMES -  it can be 4 or 5 SSDP frames every 100ms (so up to 40/50 SSDP FRAMES every second , inducing on disrupted traffic (lag)) 

 

 

 

And now if Network discovery is disabled, ping is clean, there is only QUAKE3 frames

 

 

 

 

Thank you @bubblehash , and good job for the tutorial!

 

 

 

Edited May 15, 2020 by GHARIB

[-=HipKat=-]

3 hours ago, bubblehash said:

Hey dudes -

 

Ever since the COVID stuff started, I've been convinced something felt...different when I played ET. It didn't really make sense either. I just built a new PC, upgraded internet, new router, stable ping, blah blah blah. No matter what I did, aiming and shooting with smg's never seemed smooth enough. It's hard to explain...but you kinda just know how it's supposed to feel when you're aiming at someone's face and you click to shoot. That's gotta make sense to the other people that have been playing this game for 15 years. Your brain knows the timing between clicking the mouse and what your eyeballs should be seeing  

 

I did all kinds of crazy stuff in my hunt for the lag, but I finally gave up and just watched packets in wireshark for longer than I'd like to admit. What I noticed was that my network was noisy as hell. That didn't make a lot of sense either. I play at night when no one's really watching anything. I've got a wired connection on my desktop, so it definitely jumped out at me when I kept seeing the names of dozen wireless devices show up in wireshark. From there I went down a rabbit hole of stamping out unwanted interrupts on my nic/cpu. Once I got to about 30 tabs open in chrome, I realized that I had done all the same stuff I was seeing on my XP box a decade ago to achieve the same goals.

 

What I did only really works because I don't need my home desktop for work stuff. Windows 10 just kind of assumes your computer MUST be part of a heavily inter-connected enterprise network for whatever reason. That ends up leading to all kinds of things constantly talking back and forth on the network. It's not enough to slow you down when you're doing daily life computer stuff, but it's stealing milliseconds constantly. I figured those little bits of time could definitely be messing with the mouse click -> hit sound -> recoil shake -> enemy muzzle flash -> damage shake flow that felt off. 

 

Be careful doing some of this stuff if your network traffic is more important than browsing/ET. If you're on WiFi, some of it might still help, but I don't know.

 

Step 1) Build a fence so your neighbors know you don't like them

 

Open up the old school looking firewall management tool. Hit your windows key and start searching for Windows Defender Firewall with Advanced Security. It's one of those apps that's too complicated to update to the fancy UI. We're not going to mess with the rules, we just want to start building a fence around our PC.

 

Right click on the root Windows Defender Firewall... item on the left and go to properties

 

 

Do the following for all 3 network profiles at the top unless you know which one you're using: Domain, Private, Public. Note, this is where we start to make our PC less friendly to other devices, so be careful if you care about talking to other devices in your house in a healthy way.

 

Click on the Customize button for Settings

 

 

Select No for Allow unicast response then click OK

 

 

2) Tell your neighbors to piss off and never talk to them again

 

Open up Control Panel. Make sure it's not that new Settings app or whatever.  Assuming you've got the default view layout, click on Network and Internet.

 

 

Click on Network and Sharing Center

 

 

Click on Change advanced sharing settings on the left.

 

 

We want to turn off network discovery for Private and Guest/Public. I also turned off file and printer sharing since I don't need them. This is another thing that you probably don't want to do if you need to get to your desktop from another place in your house for whatever reason.

 

 

 

Then expand All Networks and turn off Public folder sharing

 

 

Save changes to go back to the Network and Sharing Center. Now click on your active adapter.

 

 

Click Properties

 

 

Turn off all the stuff you don't need unless your PC needs to talk to other PCs. Like I said before, I only really need browsing/ET type networking from my desktop and those still work great. Ignore the Npcap entry, that's something you'll only have if you've installed packet analysis software.

 

 

 

I only need my computer for the network traffic I generate, so I only want IPv4 and IPv6 enabled on my desktop.

 

Click OK and restart your computer.

 

Step 3) Hopefully get some headshots before you die now

 

No screenshots here because it's late, but my lagometer hasn't moved since doing this a few days ago and it feels like there's a direct connection between my hands, mouse, keyboard, and eyeballs again.

 

I was always convinced that it felt better playing on my old college computer than anything recent, and this kind of network stuff getting in the way might make sense. ET is an old game, It doesn't care about bandwidth. It only really cares about latency. Our home connections are a hell of a lot "faster" now, but all those new things Windows keeps adding mean I don't really have a dedicated gaming box by default. It definitely feels like I've got that now.

Nice work, man. Now, I hope I can still stream Plex to my other Devices. The only changes I had to make were in the Adapter Properties. The rest I had toggled off already

[bubblehash]

@-=HipKat=- - You shouldn't have too much headache as long as your PC and Plex are wired up with IPs or hostnames directly. The stuff we turn off here is centered around the way devices figure out their local network forests when they're in mesh-style setups with shared folders everywhere like you'd see in a typical office setting. Your PC is still hooked up to your local network with a reachable IP/hostname. It's just not going to send out a "hey gang! i'm alive and this is my name! wanna be friends?" blast of packets every X seconds.

 

With IPv6 and WiFi devices running all over the house, my desktop being the only physically connected machine meant it was basically being treated as the DNS service for the connected tvs/rokus/tablets/etc. Just a constant flood of devices asking "hey what's your name? do you know where this other network resource is? do you know the name of this IP address? can you connect me to that device? etc."

 

@GHARIB - Spot on dude! It's almost like you're a network engineer or something   I just wanted to add that it looks like you've got that view filtered, but the same level of interruption traffic also happens on the IPv6 address space. Realizing I had completely ignored a parallel network stream in my optimizations was an "Aha!" moment in squashing this behavior.

[Snuffs99]

1 hour ago, bubblehash said:

@GHARIB - Spot on dude! It's almost like you're a network engineer or something   I just wanted to add that it looks like you've got that view filtered, but the same level of interruption traffic also happens on the IPv6 address space. Realizing I had completely ignored a parallel network stream in my optimizations was an "Aha!" moment in squashing this behavior.

First off nice tutorial and well put together.

 

I don't think the wireshark view is filtered on GHARIBs post mate, thats what mine looks like on WS too once connected to a server..... once all the background shite is stopped and your connected to an ET server that is more or less exactly how it should look.
IPv6 is of no use to me atm so I've currently got all IPv6 turned off completely, plus when/if using a VPN if IPv6 is enabled it can cause really slow host resolves and general HTTP browsing can be reallllly slllooooowwwww.

 

Also @HipKat 

If like me your PC is the source for all other equipment in your house etc to connect to for PLex etc then its advisable to make sure your PC or device is given the same network IP from your router each time if not already set. Just makes it so easier to share when you know the IP of the source is constant.

[captnconcrete]

nice one fellas . ima check it out! thank u .

[-=HipKat=-]

19 hours ago, bubblehash said:

@-=HipKat=- - You shouldn't have too much headache as long as your PC and Plex are wired up with IPs or hostnames directly. The stuff we turn off here is centered around the way devices figure out their local network forests when they're in mesh-style setups with shared folders everywhere like you'd see in a typical office setting. Your PC is still hooked up to your local network with a reachable IP/hostname. It's just not going to send out a "hey gang! i'm alive and this is my name! wanna be friends?" blast of packets every X seconds.

 

With IPv6 and WiFi devices running all over the house, my desktop being the only physically connected machine meant it was basically being treated as the DNS service for the connected tvs/rokus/tablets/etc. Just a constant flood of devices asking "hey what's your name? do you know where this other network resource is? do you know the name of this IP address? can you connect me to that device? etc."

 

@GHARIB - Spot on dude! It's almost like you're a network engineer or something   I just wanted to add that it looks like you've got that view filtered, but the same level of interruption traffic also happens on the IPv6 address space. Realizing I had completely ignored a parallel network stream in my optimizations was an "Aha!" moment in squashing this behavior.

Yep, streamed a few movies to my TV last night, no issue. 

[-=HipKat=-]

17 hours ago, Snuffs99 said:

Also @HipKat 

If like me your PC is the source for all other equipment in your house etc to connect to for PLex etc then its advisable to make sure your PC or device is given the same network IP from your router each time if not already set. Just makes it so easier to share when you know the IP of the source is constant.

There's a LOT of things I wish I knew how to do with my Routers (I use 3 Linksys Tri-band Mesh Routers) as far as setting IP's, ports, etc, but as much as I can do with building and mod'g computers, I don't much at all about Networking, which is bad, since everything is so connected now

[captnconcrete]

looks as tho these fine fellas could teach you   on  networking.

[ElEl]

I'll look into this cause I'm having a lot of issues on Jay2 at the moment.

 

On 5/15/2020 at 7:28 AM, bubblehash said:

Ever since the COVID stuff started, I've been convinced something felt...different when I played ET.

Is it possible it's due to a Windows update or something? I've seen a lot of people having the same problem recently.

 

My knowledge on networks is just 'they're magic' but this tutorial was great, thanks guys.

[captnconcrete]

2 hours ago, ElEl said:

I'll look into this cause I'm having a lot of issues on Jay2 at the moment.

 

Is it possible it's due to a Windows update or something? I've seen a lot of people having the same problem recently.

 

My knowledge on networks is just 'they're magic' but this tutorial was great, thanks guys.

seems as if it gets ddosed a few times aday when its populated. im sure carano and betrayal will  agree . to bad we cant write a little program when they ddos so it loops back to them and crashes there shit .. but i understand we cant stoop too there level.

[-=HipKat=-]

8 minutes ago, captnconcrete said:

seems as if it gets ddosed a few times aday when its populated. im sure carano and betrayal will  agree . to bad we cant write a little program when they ddos so it loops back to them and crashes there shit .. but i understand we cant stoop too there level.

I brought that up to DD and he says the logs don't show any DDoS

[captnconcrete]

5 minutes ago, -=HipKat=- said:

I brought that up to DD and he says the logs don't show any DDoS

well i disagree i see it . and i always run my lagometer. ill just  auto recorded it and show him then. it got attacked yesterday. evening who ever is doing it isnt to skilled at how they are doing it either. it just lags like crap. whole server everyone notices it when it happens. and then bam its gone. its a meek little puss program some noobie is usuing.lol

Edited May 16, 2020 by captnconcrete

[-=HipKat=-]

1 minute ago, captnconcrete said:

well i disagree i see it . and i always run my lagometer. ill just  auto recorded it and show him then. it got attacked yesterday. evening

Yeah, same here and I been around long enough to know what a DDoS looks like on an ET Server

[captnconcrete]

1 minute ago, -=HipKat=- said:

Yeah, same here and I been around long enough to know what a DDoS looks like on an ET Server

yup ive delte with this bs  a time or two my self.