Lag question

[xavram]

So we've been noticing something weird in our game. I'm running the server, all the players are connected on their laptops. What's bizzare is that alot of times, a player will type something in and other players will see the text output BEFORE I do. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me, shouldn't the laptop that's acting as the server see things first? And I'm talking about about a sometimes significant delay, like 5+ seconds between when everyone sees the output and when I do.

We're all playing at the same house, but I've noticed that some players have to connect via the RPTools alias, whereas others can do it via Direct...and some have to use the IP address. I know all of these should get the same result but it seems odd that some work for others and others do not.

Am I not setting something up correctly as the server? You'd think, with all of us on the same network, that lag would be very minimum but its not, especially on larger maps.

Thanks, any insight would be appreciated.

[RPTroll]

Complete guess but I'm assuming you're the one running the server which has extra duties over and above what the client MapTools do. So you have a lot of threads coming into and out of existence handling various things in the game. Depending on the game framework in use, this could lead to the chat output coming in later for you than for others. You could test this by letting someone else run the server to see if the chat lag switch to their machine.

It can also be affected by system speed, network settings and a number of other factors that could lead to the chat updating a little slower for you than others. There could be issues with your network card or wireless receiver as well. You could try another chat program to see if the lag is similar.

Again, just guessing.