Punk Buster and what it does...

[Ol Smoke]

I have seen some guys on here talking about PB and why it isn't turned on, and what does it actually do.

After researching this for another team I came up with some good and bad about PB. So here goes.

PB was designed primarily to prevent one keycode from being used on several machines at the same time.

This was it's first purpose in life. But later on came "Fair Play" which you see when you download PB now.

Fairplay is a way to make online gaming uniform to all the players. When a person is near the server

they have a lower ping than others who are farther away. Because of this millisecond delay, the closer

player always has the advantage over higher ping players when it comes to shooting at each other. The

ping can delay the image to the more distant player by 100 milliseconds (1/10th of a second) or more. That

means the closer player can see and shoot faster than the farther player. There were those in the online

industry who wanted this to be more even. So that a player in New York and a player in Los Angeles are

within 20 ms of each other. (Remember it takes 20 ms to talk to your own computer) So what PB did was

write a code so that PB takes all the pings and generalizes them. This makes the game more even. But

what it also did, was slow the game down, in order to achieve this. If you want to see this in action on a PB

server, just spec someone and you will see that you don't see everything he does, at the same time he does.

Sometimes you wonder why he didn't shoot faster, well this is because of "delay framing". There is a reason

why Activision put 80 fps as their maxfps in the config file. If everyone limited their Video cards to 80 fps max,

then everyone would be in sync (sort of). There are differences in speed of video cards and lan settings that

also affect this. Now the worst thing you can do is set you fps to "0". This allows the video card timer full control

over the frame rate. Not a good thing. If you are running and gunning then you get max fps at that setting. But,

if you are sitting and camping, your fps goes down to 50. So when you turn to shoot, the video card ramps up,

and gives you full fps, but it takes time to do that. So you miss a lot and you cant figure out how a guy ran

right through your bullet but didn't get hit. The truth is, he wasn't in that frame at that time so it never registered

the hit. So if you camp a lot, set the max fps to 80 and leave it there. Then set your screen refresh to 60 hz and

sync the video to the screen refresh. This will give you more accurate hits. But if you run and gun, these settings

do very little for you. Once you get over 100fps, you are only seeing about 60% of the frames produced. The

other frames can't sync so they are dropped. So this is why the best players lock their frame rates to 100 and

never sync the video rate. They are moving so fast it doesn't matter. But if you lock your fps to 125 or 150 you

will get more frame drop and gain nothing. So choose wisely grasshopper.

Now what happens on our Beginner's server is this. The people who have lower ping rates than you, will always

win in a shoot out. The only reason they don't is because they are better players than you. So the best way to

become a better player is to run the map over and over and watch where the campers are always located. Shoot

first and check later.

If you have questions about stopping hackers with PB I can write another post, but actually PB doesnt handle

hacking very good, because the code changes so fast.

Good luck

**If you have more questions and understand technical writing, I can post a website that goes into great detail

about all this.

[Dak]

Good stuff Smoke.

 

Question: I run my video locked at 250fps and do not sync the video. Would I get the exact same results with my video locked to 100fps?

 

Thanks,

[Ol Smoke]

Yes. But this only applies to COD4 using the old engine model. The newer stuff out today for dual video cards doesn't fall under these rules. Some guys are getting 400 fps with jacked up CPU's and video.

[daBroviest]

Oh mah lawrd... TLDR... but I read it anyway........