Windows 7 stutter


(jaybird) #1

I installed ET and was trying to play and noticed I was getting a regular stutter on my client that quickly became quite annoying. Every 2 seconds my client has a stutter, and anti-warp kicks in since the server did not receive a command or two from me. I’m on Windows 7, and have tried setting compatibility settings and setting cpu affinity to a single core as well.

The problem is observed with vanilla binaries even in the menus before connecting to a server.

Has anyone seen this? And if so, do you have a workaround for it? It’s awful hard to play like this.


(crapshoot) #2

anything out of the ordinary show up in task manager or event logs? to me it sounds like something related to disk i/o. perhaps an indexing service is running or their defrag service is running unexpectedly.

i’ve disabled desktop compositing, removed bonjour service and disabled ipv6 on the nic and haven’t really had any problems running in Windows 7. i also do not have pb installed at all, but cannot really say whether or not it has much effect.


(Shanks) #3

IIRC this has something to do with sound buffering in Windows 7.
I had to do many, many tweaks to my OS to get ET to play nice…


(daz2007) #4

Windows 7/Vista and Direct Sound Don’t Get Along to well

DirectSound runs in emulation mode on the Microsoft software mixer. The emulator does not have hardware abstraction, so there is no hardware DirectSound acceleration, meaning hardware and software relying on DirectSound acceleration may have degraded performance.

A Build of ET with X-audio Would Solve this (without the Xreal Fat)


(Bonghead) #5

daz2007 might be on to something. I didn’t understand your thread, since I have not had any problems (win 7 x64). But I have an external soundcard (because I’m a hero).


(jaybird) #6

I did figure out what it was. It certainly wasn’t I/O related as it’s installed on an SSD :slight_smile:

I have an nvidia gfx card, and the fix was in the nvidia control panel. Under 3D Settings -> Manage 3D settings -> Program settings, for WolfET, turn “Threaded Optimization” off (in lieu of On or Auto). It took a while but I found the solution somewhere on the web, and a video showed the same issue.

Now it plays smooth.


(Justice) #7

Jaybird, I LOVE YOU!
I’ve been camping with this problem over a year now, thanks to you I FINALLY have a solution!
Thanks, thanks, and some more thanks!

Offtopic: I know you’ve heard this so many times already, but since you reinstalled ET, are you going to develop Jaymod again? I know many players would be really thankful if you do.
Just a question… I heard many rumors which differ from each other.
If you’re not, I completely understand :wink:


(jaybird) #8

I was hoping the info would help someone. Glad it fixed it for you too :slight_smile:

I don’t have any plans to work on the mod. I did mess around with the engine source once it was released. I tweaked a little code and got proper widescreen support working (the game looks like crap currently on a 16:9 display), but I don’t think doing anything with the engine is really worthwhile since most folks won’t want to use a custom build sans PB. Hell, a majority of folks would never do the upgrade to 2.60b even.

Just curious, what rumors?


(Justice) #9

I think I have widescreen, but I’m probably used to it’s ****ty looks then :wink:
I’m pretty sure people would upgrade to 2.6b if most modders would explicitly request their mod to be run on a 2.6b server. I barely see new players in ET and everybody knows how to upgrade, so that wouldn’t be such a problem.

Well I’ve heard you were going to develop when you would come back, but also you’d given up modding.


(stealth6) #10

[QUOTE='Just!ce.;269889]I think I have widescreen, but I’m probably used to it’s ****ty looks then :wink:
I’m pretty sure people would upgrade to 2.6b if most modders would explicitly request their mod to be run on a 2.6b server. I barely see new players in ET and everybody knows how to upgrade, so that wouldn’t be such a problem.[/QUOTE]

There are still new players in ET.
Modders won’t force people to use 2.60b and even if they tried I bet alot of servers would still run a hacked version or something.

I wouldn’t mind running a different ET since I don’t play on pb servers anymore (pb is slowly was slowly killing ET so most servers disabled it)
Would be interesting if you just released the files and just put in the readme that you can’t use them if you play on pb servers.
EDIT: lol I made it sound official like “releasing the files”, you could just upload them and put a link here then people that stumble across it can try it out. Then it’s completely at their own risk.


(jaybird) #11

Well, I got the engine side of things done, but there’s a lot of work to do client side that I haven’t done.

Everything in the q3 engine is drawn on a 640x480 virtual grid, and those coordinates are stretched to higher (or even lower) pixels locations based on your resolution. This makes things very easy in the client since, while programming, you can write code once that will work on all resolutions.

Because of this, most things in the client are drawn at absolute locations on that virtual grid. As an example, half of the screen horizontally is 320 (640/2). But that grid assumes a 4:3 aspect ratio, which 1920x1080 is not (it’s 16:9). So the grid must change. Keeping the height at 480, the width must change to about 854. 320 is no longer the center of that screen.

A better way to draw on the screen is to anchor things in the client to some side of the screen. For example, I could say I want the compass drawn not at x coordinate 500 (that’s a guess), but at the total screen width minus 140. The end result is that the things drawn on the screen will not end up stretched and they will show up on the screen places people would expect. As you can imagine, this is a lot of work.


(jaybird) #12

I just realized I can do this without an engine mod. I’ve got proper aspect ratio working in jaymod now heh.


(jaybird) #13

And now I’m working on merging the latest omnibot version. I’ve opened up the jaymod forums again, if anyone cares.


(stealth6) #14

dusts off the old account

Thought you weren’t going to work on jaymod anymore? :stuck_out_tongue:


(Shownie) #15

Great news, thanks Jaybird!


(jaybird) #16

Plans change :slight_smile:


(hellreturn) #17

Thank you :slight_smile: I noticed it yesterday :slight_smile:

Would it be possible to also add security fixes?


(crapshoot) #18

nice Jaybird. should make a lot of ob users very happy.


(merlin1991) #19

**** yeah!


(Dragonji) #20

Could you write a bit more what will be in new Jaymod release? We’re looking forward for LUA support, bugfixes, security fixes and everything what can you code there :slight_smile: