Important Notice to Lomac Pilots = Please Read

Dude Joined: Mar 05, 2003 Posts: 10 Location: Australia

"Bandwidth Battle"

Some of you would know i run a server in Hyperlobby.

Running a server well for Lo-Mac is not a straight-forward task. There are many things that can crash a server or make it a Warp-Fest. It also needs top of the line hardware like my laptop i bought specifically for the task.
P4 3.2GHz, 1024 DDR400 RAM, Radeon 9600128MB, etc.etc.
synchronous ADSL 512/512kbp/s

Very early on the 169th experimented with diferent network settings and it became obvious that 28.8 for server as well as hosts made for the best online connection for more than 8 players. Here is a Link to our original findings.
http://ubbxforums.ubi.com/6/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=400102&f=38610606&m=31410409

Since then We've had to Battle with Bandwidth hogs. People who on there own, without experimenting have decided that they know beter than us and Ignore the Session Information or even direct requests by hosts and othe players.

Because of this I've had to try different ways of dealing with this problem. We devised a way to secure the server by passwording it, making all players register to our home page http://169thpanthers.net and reading some rules and agreeing to them before receiving the password. This worked quite well but it was difficult to get good numbers of people flying at once. something else had to be done. After some research in Google i found 2 very useful tools. Bandwidth Monitor Pro and TCPView. Both free and easy to use, I could now monitor bandwidth usage and The ip adress of all players joining and leaving my server.

Now the reason for this post. I can now PROVE that players joining on higher settings than 28.8 Do suck up the bandwidth. They may not warp and everything may look just fine to them, but as soon as they start to fly the needle will increase by up to 100kbps. when set at 28.8 the average usage for 1 player is les than 10kbps.

So if you are one of these people who will ignore the requests of the server, dont be surprised if the next time you try to join you cant. Being able to track ip's live and bandwidth means that i can make a rule in my Firewall to ban that ip from connecting.

All I ask is people Read the Brief, Connect at 28.8, and respect the Rules. If the loadout says "DO NOT CHANGE" thats exactly what it means. The server may also ask a player to reboot.

thankyou for reading

Dude Joined: Feb 08, 2003 Posts: 31 Location: Alaska, USA

Sounds fair enough. Your sandbox, your rules.

Also sounds like ED needs to do some improvement to net-code if users are permitted to force less than optimum settings on a host.

I've shelved LOMAC for another year much like I did way back when with F4.

Postman Joined: Oct 15, 2003 Posts: 65 Location: USA

all 43 of you who play lomac online Smile

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Dude Joined: Mar 05, 2003 Posts: 10 Location: Australia

yea well got tired of kicking your butt leadspitter.
Lomac requires a iq higher than your shoe Wink

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