Supplement : Internet Games. Speed them up! And smooth them out!

   As long as you find a fast and fairly empty server and most importantly one on a fast net connection, Internet Games of Half-Life have been pretty good. But lets face it, its still not as good as it could be and certainly not as 'lag free' as Quakeworld! But lets hope after a lot of tweaking on our side and of course on the part of Valve that we'll soon have no reason to blame the ping times!

   I know there are lots of hardcore config editing utilities all over which sometimes require a real hardcore config editing nutcase to be able to put into practise, but hopefully the concise guide below to just a miniscule few console commands will help you generate a configuration to ensure you can get the best possible game Half-Life over the net.

Config files? Eh? Whats that then?

   Starting from scratch here, a configuration file for Half-Life, or .cfg is a plain text file (but with a .cfg ending not a .txt ending) which contains instructions for Half-Life on which keys are bound to which controls in the game. Actually Half-Life also takes key-bindings from inside the system registry as well, but we can ignore that for the time being. There is only one bit of 'protocol' which you need to understand when it comes to config files, that being that within the .cfg there can be comments which are preceeded by two backslashes;

\\for instance these three
\\comment lines can help to describe the configuration at that point
\\or simply advertise the fact that Half-Life@Far2Cool is the best. Nuff said.

   The first thing you should do is to place an autoexec.cfg into your \half-life\valve directory, an autoexec.cfg, as the name suggests will automatically execute whenever you run hl.exe. Please bear in mind that when you start changing your config settings as you get more experianced, you might find conflicts, or simply bindings not working properly due to this autoexec.cfg. Therefore its best to keep the settings in the autoexec.cfg as universal as possible so you dont create hassle for yourself at a later date.

Now the configuration!

   There are countless console commands for Half-Life, all of which you can see here The screenshot below shows you the basic autoexec.cfg which I've already prepared, it dosent do anything too drastic so you can safely try it out, but it most certainly wont be tweaked for your system. Download the autoexec.cfg and extract to \half-life\valve, using the correct path to wherever you've installed Half-Life.

fps_modem - Frames-Per-Second for modem connections

   This command limits the maximum number of frames per second which Half-Life will run to when running a game through a modem connection, singleplayer ie: fps_single is unaffected by this and will run at its defualt value of 72fps.

   The more fps the computer is running, the more times the computer is requesting updates from the server, this could get silly for super fast systems running at upwards of 50fps. Setting a limit of 30fps will significantly smooth out the gameplay, stopping nasty jerks and glitches. Reducing the lagginess and decreasing the ping times, you have to compensate with lower frame rates, but 30fps should be a perfectly acceptable limit.

rate - Server Update Frequency

   Setting the rate lower will poduce lower pings to the server because your computer will be sent data less frequently from the server, but as the updates will be less frequent you could find youself on the end of a jerky game or inconsistent game. A setting of 3000 should be perfectly useable, however if you have a decent 56k modem a setting in the range of 3000 to 5000 could work very well. And likewise if you modem is a 28.8 or just slow then a setting of less than 3000 might be advised.

pushlatency - Ping difference

   I belive the pushlatency is an automatic command which sets itself to negative your average ping, but if your ping varies really erratically and your playing suffers as a result set this to a negative value around what you think your average ping is.

r_netgraph - Packet Analyser

   By typing r_netgraph 1 into the console it wil activate the packet anaylsis graph, a rather cool looking and extremely useful utility which will help you to clean up the connection between the client (you) and the server.

   The graph is constantly updating itself a basic guide is that green is good, yellow worse and red bad. Green describes packets of data which have successfully been transferred, yellow is data which the computer has deliberatly dropped to ensure smooth gameplay and red is packets that have either been lost of held up somewhere along the line and which the computer never recieved until too late.

   Below are several screenshots of netgraphs which show you how they can vary, along with the type of modems that are being used.

	This connection isnt very good, there are far too many yellow lines there really should be a lot more green.
	This connection is a lot more stable, the big chunk of red in the middle was caused by a level change, although there are a few red spikes here and there it is overall a lot better than the firs one.
	This is my own connection, using my rather nifty Pace 56K internal modem and of course using all my tips and hints here. You too can have a ping like mine!