Is it possible to intentionally lag your client?

[Punk_FAS]

I just started playing again last night (03/09), and I've noticed a few players that are almost constantly warping around, as if they're experiencing packet loss, or some sort of recurring lag spike. This makes them very difficult to hit, as their movements aren't in any way predictable. From their point of view though, I'm not sure if they are experiencing this lag, as they still seem to maintain their target without apparent issue during these lag spikes. One player, Whipl@sh, was doing this warping thing, and when I expressed my frustrations at trying to hit him because of it, it seemed to come as a surprise to him. This gives these players a pretty huge defensive advantage, but it doesn't really appear to affect their offense necessarily.

So, is it possible that some of these players are doing this intentionally, for that defensive advantage, via some program or whatnot? I am not attempting to accuse anyone of trying to bend or break the rules, I'm just curious if this is even possible.

[haunted]

Short answer, no. You probably just haven't played in awhile and you're having trouble hitting those laggy SOB's.

[quadz]

I just started playing again last night (03/09), and I've noticed a few players that are almost constantly warping around, as if they're experiencing packet loss, or some sort of recurring lag spike. This makes them very difficult to hit, as their movements aren't in any way predictable. From their point of view though, I'm not sure if they are experiencing this lag, as they still seem to maintain their target without apparent issue during these lag spikes.

If you didn't already do so, make sure to check your own lag stats for packetloss, just in case. (If you're using q2pro, they've renamed the netgraph command to something else. I never remember what the @#$% it is in that client, but it's there somewhere.)

But indeed, if you're consistently seeing the warping just on specific players then it would indicate the issue being on their end.

Packetloss as well as congested upload bandwidth on their side can cause stuttering and warping movement. (In the latter case, a series of packets from their client could get buffered, and arrive at the server all at once, which might make them appear to have paused for a moment, then zoom ahead.)


Regards,

quadz

[Punk_FAS]

Short answer, no. You probably just haven't played in awhile and you're having trouble hitting those laggy SOB's.

Perhaps. I'm only seeing the warping on specific players though. One guy named [cc]crisco was doing it heavily, and then the Whipl@sh guy. I was asking crisco about it, and he said he was playing via Wi-Fi; I'm not sure if that could be the cause (I always play hard-wired into my router/modem). Probably just lag on their end. crisco did say he was experiencing some lag on his end as well.

I did check netgraph and I have only seen two individual lines of red/packet loss in the few times that I displayed it. I think those occurred around the time the map changed, so that may be the cause of that. Otherwise, things are running very smoothly for me (now I have no excuses if anybody comes and hands me my arse )

[M0us3]

Normal, wifi payers most likely with packet loss. Serial laggers crisco, whipl@ash, and pepp come to mind.

[|iR|Focalor]

Believe it or not, it IS possible to intentionally lag yourself. They sometimes call such programs UDP flooders (I think), but usually call them "lag bots". And I have one actually. I use it from time to time.

*my indian name is Waits With Trollface*

No, it's not what you think. I don't use it for Quake2. I use it for when I'm playing GTA5 Online on XboxOne and I want to lag out of a public lobby populated with other players and into a public lobby just by myself. When playing freemode with other people and you try to complete CEO, biker, and gunrunning business sales, other players will always blow your shit up with a fighter jet or an armored vehicle before you can complete the sale and collect the money. But you can ONLY do such activities in the public sessions, not in private or invite only sessions. So to get rid of the other people who wanna blow your shit up and prevent you from making the most GTA$, you just get a lag bot program on your PC or your phone, turn it on, and wait to be split from the populated lobby into a lobby by yourself. You can also use it to lag yourself momentarily, jump out and shoot someone, and then unlag, and they die and you don't. I've never done that myself since my xbox and the pc where the program is are in two different rooms on opposite sides of the house, but I know other people used to do it... happened to me a few times before the tweaked the timeout threshold to mostly mitigate lagbot usage. (not sure, I think so, seems like they must have, hasn't happened at all in a long time)

But Quake2 and GTA Online are different. GTA's multiplayer is some kinda cloud based shit, whereas Quake2 has a dedicated server. If you turn on a packet flooder in Q2, everyone else will see you freeze, and your OWN view will freeze as well. I don't think it's possible to manipulate the up and down rates individually.

Although I did have one player maybe using some kind of lag script on me the other day. It was DM6/LavaTomb. I was ferociously chasing this dude with a blaster after both of us ran out of SSG ammo. I chased him up the SSG stairs, to the left into that room, and then left again across the 3 collapsing lava platforms. I was right on his ass, and right when we hit the 2nd platform, he froze midair, I fall into the lava, he unfreezes and continues on to the BFG... He had not lagged at all before then. That was an awfully convenient time to lag.

 

I'm not sure if it still works, but I seem to remember reading a thread around here once where someone had a freeze toggle bind that would change their "rate" setting to 0 and freeze them in place. I just tried a bind like that with r1q2/r1gl and it didn't work.

[Jay Dolan]

It's entirely possible to write a lag bot that would suspend outgoing packets with a bind. I think a poor man's approach to this years ago was just to `cl_maxfps 0` every few seconds. The client would temporarily freeze in place because no packets would be sent to the server until the frame cap was restored to a reasonable value.

I actually added something like this to Quetoo for simulating network latency on localhost, which is helpful when changing the network protocol, packet rate, etc. This intentionally adds configurable lag and drift to the loopback packet buffer (localhost only), but it'd be pretty straightforward to do this with the actual net socket as well:

https://github.com/jdolan/quetoo/blob/master/src/net/net_udp.c#L74

[[BTF]Fatknitty]

I have the opposite problem.   When certain people log in I experience very bad packet loss.  My netgraph will be off the chart.  Devious said she sees the same thing some times when I log on.  I'm on WiFi. 

Good to see ya Punk!!

[quadz]

When certain people log in I experience very bad packet loss.  My netgraph will be off the chart.  Devious said she sees the same thing some times when I log on.  I'm on WiFi. 

"Malaria was for centuries a baffling plague. It was observed that persons who went out at night often developed the malady. So, on the best post hoc reasoning, night air was assumed to be the cause of malaria, and elaborate precautions were taken to shut it out of sleeping quarters. Some scientists, however, were skeptical of this theory. A long series of experiments eventually proved that malaria was caused by the bite of the anopheles mosquito. Night air entered the picture only because mosquitoes preferred to attack in the dark."
  — Stuart Chase, Guides to Straight Thinking. Harper, 1956

In other words, it would be interesting to know what's really going on with your connection. I've no doubt you're experiencing intermittent bouts of packetloss; but the idea of it being correlated with 'certain people' on the server is so at odds with how the netcode works, it's only a bet you'd take if you wanted to lose money.

Unless these certain players are doing something in game like spamming the hyperblaster, or spamming userinfo changes—i.e. doing something that any player could do to cause the server to need to push a bit more data to other clients—there's nothing in general about how the Q2 netcode works that will degrade your connection based on the presence or absence of some specific player.

[Fractal]

I'd like to see the various hacks, that are possible, demonstrated on a server for people to see what its like.

[quadz]

I'd like to see the various hacks, that are possible, demonstrated on a server for people to see what its like.

Sounds like a job for a youtube video.

[haunted]

Check out my YouTube channel there's all sorts of examples.

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCCecJBZvpRwNIhYPiYb9ILw

[Whipl@sh]

Short answer, no. You probably just haven't played in awhile and you're having trouble hitting those laggy SOB's.

Perhaps. I'm only seeing the warping on specific players though. One guy named [cc]crisco was doing it heavily, and then the Whipl@sh guy. I was asking crisco about it, and he said he was playing via Wi-Fi; I'm not sure if that could be the cause (I always play hard-wired into my router/modem). Probably just lag on their end. crisco did say he was experiencing some lag on his end as well.

I did check netgraph and I have only seen two individual lines of red/packet loss in the few times that I displayed it. I think those occurred around the time the map changed, so that may be the cause of that. Otherwise, things are running very smoothly for me (now I have no excuses if anybody comes and hands me my arse )

Hello! Just found out about this forum and this thread about me, so I thought I should respond (sidenote, I can't believe I've been a member since 2007!). I want to assure you I was using the standard q2pro client and wasn't cheating and have no idea how that warping was caused. I have been rather disappointed with the q2pro client, as I think it may have caused the issues based on other weird behavior I've had, explained below. Also, I did play on Wi-Fi just like crisco, and on a laptop that has just Intel integrated graphics. So possibly a Wi-Fi or poor hardware issue. I did see crisco warping around as well at times and also talked to him about it. I think he said he was using an old macbook? So maybe it's an issue when there is Wi-Fi and old/poor hardware?

It's also interesting because I don't think I was warping at all until the day after I first noticed crisco doing it... I remember being annoyed with it happening to him, and then the next day playing when you (Punk) were annoyed with me saying you saw it happen to me. Perhaps something with the server changed in how it reads packets from players? I used rate of 3000 and cl_maxfps of 250. Those are the two things I can think of that affect how my client communicates with the server.

Since that day you noticed it, it's happened occasionally to me, and I have noticed it affecting my play. Some times the only affect it has on my play is causing my screen to be a little choppy, other times the commands that I send to move/shoot to be delayed like standard lag.

Back to being disappointed with q2pro. I have noticed that for the first match or two that I play right after starting up q2pro, I had extremely high FPS with very fluid gameplay, almost like I was playing on a local game and not online. But as I continued to play, my game gets sluggish and that fluidity disappears. It got to the point where I was quitting my q2 client after each match and starting it over again, rejoining the server, to get back to that high FPS.

I also noticed issues where my mouse pointer started to show up on top of the q2 client and q2 would get minimized at random times.

Also, if I ever used the Windows button to bring up the start menu in order to check my desktop (to read IM's or emails), when I went back to q2 in full screen, the client would be much more sluggish than prior to pressing that Windows button.

I'm guessing the q2pro client has one or more memory leaks that build up over time, and that on poor hardware like mine, the affect is noticeable soon after playing. It probably also has problems with being minimized and then going back to full screen.

Anyway, just some thoughts I had on why those issues happened to me. I'm sorry it caused frustration while you were playing. I know how hard it was to play against crisco.. I'm glad you brought it up here so I could respond. Hopefully it doesn't happen to any more people.

I'm likely done playing now, and just came on here tonight to look over the site one last time before letting go of q2... I started playing in 1997 and stopped during college around 2004, and have missed it at times over the years. It was a lot of fun to play with you guys the last few months, reminiscing over the years in clans, watching old demos I had recorded, and trying to get good again at the jumps in the MH room on q2dm1 But it's time to go back to adulting and finish up here. I might be on the forum some, but I've deleted the game.

Cheers!
Whip

[Punk_FAS]

I'm likely done playing now, and just came on here tonight to look over the site one last time before letting go of q2... I started playing in 1997 and stopped during college around 2004, and have missed it at times over the years. It was a lot of fun to play with you guys the last few months, reminiscing over the years in clans, watching old demos I had recorded, and trying to get good again at the jumps in the MH room on q2dm1 But it's time to go back to adulting and finish up here. I might be on the forum some, but I've deleted the game.

Cheers!
Whip

Well, as long as quadz keeps the servers up and running, you should be able to download and play Q2 here on the tasty servers. Perhaps, if you ever do get the itch to hop on and play again, you could try the R1Q2 client. I've used that one for about as long as it's been out (or that I've been aware of it, anyway). I've never experienced any of the issues you've described with R1Q2.

Thanks for at least popping in and saying hello.

PS - It appears I'm on a little hiatus again myself. I'm sure I'll be back again though, and it probably won't be a ~6-7 year absence like it was this last time.