Not really ded, but a hosting question......

[Hell Raiser]

I've got cable and I host the occasional game of JO with friends of mine, some on cable, some on dial-up. What kind of tweaking can I do to lower ping times for my dial-up buds?

[MatrixCPA]

Best you can do it talk them into getting some form of broadband. Phone modems have an inherent latency (lag) because of their design. There have been improvements over the years, but really there's not much that can be done on the server-side of things other than to be located nearby and have a solid connection. What's the upload cap on your cable and how many players are you planning to have play at one time?

[Hell Raiser]

lol, that's an idea, convince them to get some form of broadband.

 

eeeeh, I send files to people at 40-50KBps, and it's anywhere from 5-6 people, with about half and half with broadband and dialup.

[MatrixCPA]

Based on your send rate, I'd guess your cap is around 384k, which is better than many cable setups. That would allow for about 12 players at maxrate 10000, and about 20 at maxrate 6000. Of course, that assumes you're not using your upstream for anything else.

[Hell Raiser]

/me hugs the m33p m33p bird.

 

So what do I do when I'm hosting? sv_maxrate was set to 0 when I fiddled with it halfway in our game. I set it to something like 8000 but it didn't seem to do anything....

[MatrixCPA]

The only way you'd notice the difference would be by comparing your network usage under load. You won't see the difference in the status report because that shows what the client settings are and they are limited to the lower of their own maxrate (displayed) or the server maxrate. I assume if you set the sv_maxrate to 0, then there is no server-side limit and the client limit is used in all cases. The default maxrate for broadband clients is 25000.