When I play VO on my Mac, all is well. When I play on my newer PC, an AMD XP2200+ with a 128MB nVidia GeForce-based Ti4200 AGP card, and 512MB RAM, VO constantly 'jumps' when I'm in spaceflight. The whole display just jumps a bit, as if I'd experienced lag. Both machines are using the same network connection, and I don't *think* it's lag, but ... what else could it be? It happens every few seconds, sometimes once a second or so, and never stops while I'm in spaceflight. Typing and using the mouse seem fine. It doesn't feel like lag, but it sure looks like it.

Your tick clock is significantly slower/faster than VO's online clock. My Linux machine sometimes gets this problem with heavy disk activity. (Stupid cheap APIC...)
Either that, or you used a speedhack. :P
-:sigma.SB

Ok, try this in Windows:
find vendetta.rlb and copy it to something like v.exe and thrn run v.exe with the -b option.

Tell me if this helps.

This might also be due to your virus checker momentarily grabbing system resources from the game. I know McAfee loves to do this, can't say on others.

Some audio cards compete with the video card for bandwidth on the PCI bus. Try turning down off audio acceleration in the multimedia control panel. I've done this with other games and it has made a huge difference.

PCI video cards? Those were the days... ;)

Yeah.. some of us still have 'em. I don't know if the same thing affects AGP cards, but I think the guy that told me about the trick had one, so it's worth a shot. Worst that can happen is your sound might suck.

Ok, I tried it from the command line when properly patched. No change. The experience is just like lag -- it acts exactly like lag as far as I can tell, except that it only happens in this game, not some others I play, and, like I said, the Mac and PC, side by side, are getting about the same wireless signal strength, but I only see this lag on the PC.

The lag was enough that I crashed into the station and lost a ship trying to dock, and that's a trivial maneuver without the lag.

raybondo, does knowing that "v.exe -b" didn't change anything, um, give you any other ideas about what this might be?

Furious: thanks for the suggestion, but, as I wrote above, I'm using an AGP graphics card, not PCI, so it wouldn't be a PCI bandwidth issue.

Did you try it and verify that it doesn't help?

Thanks waleran. Turning audio acceleration off is a good suggestion too. Does the same thing happen in both fullscreen and window modes? Maybe what you're experiencing is the rendering being many frames behind itself. Going into window mode (or toggling vsync) would say whether that is the problem. I vaguely recall someone else having lagged framerate on a geforce card, so maybe that's it.

Next time you experience this, could you please type in

/ToggleFrameRate

(caps are optional)

and then report back with the results?

Type it again to shut it off.

Thanks for the ideas, folks. I've been away from gaming for a week, so I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but I hope to try all the remaining suggestions soon, and to give you the results of the /ToggleFrameRate test.

OK, I tried these suggestions. Here are the results:

1. Changing sound drivers: I get no other option, so there's nothing to change.

2. Switching from Full Screen to Windowed, and vice versa: no noticeable difference.

3. Typing "/ToggleFrameRate": At top left of screen, white text reads out stats:

Windowed: ranges from 103 - 123 fps; seems to most often hover around 114 fps... 2100 to 2268 polys, 3100 to 3400 verts, 140080 to 149999 polys/s [roughly.]

Full screen: fps rises to 129 to 132 fps. Other stats remain the same [I'm flying in the same sector during all these tests].

To elaborate a bit on the symptom: it seems like the *camera* is jumping, especially in external view. When I whack F9 once, to get the camera-behind-the-ship view, every second or so the camera seems to move very quickly around the ship and then back to behind it. Maneuvering seems to force this to to happen. Sometimes it doesn't happen unless I maneuver, and sometimes it keeps happening when I'm just flying in a straight line. It's almost like the camera bumps into something and needs to realign itself. In cockpit view, though, the whole VO universe [but not the HUD] seems to "jump" as if the ship, or camera, got bumped by something.

Hope this helps .... I'm going back to my Mac for now, where none of this happens. The PC has better graphics, though, and is in a better location for gaming [chair and desk instead of bed], so I'd like to get it squared away on the PC, if possible.

update: I tried lowering all graphic options -- no change. Tried changing some of the video options, such as trilinear down to linear, and 32 bit to 16 bit textures, etc. .... anything that might seem to be "lowering" graphics demands. No change.

Hmm. Maybe go into your Vendetta Online folder and renaming your config file there. A new one will be made when you run the game again.

Your machines are using the same network connection. Do you have any router software that might not be giving your PC priority when you run VO?

For the sound thing

Control Panels -> Sounds & Audio Devices -> audio tab -> Advanced button -> Performance tab -> Hardware acceleration slider -> set to off

you can also do it by running 'dxdiag.exe' from the 'run...' on the start menu.

Config file: tried renaming the old one. No change.

Sound acceleration: I saw what you mean [sorry to be so obtuse], disabled hardware acceleration. No change.

Router: I use a router/WAP that gives DHCP service, and it's first-come, first-served for the IP addresses, so the router won't know whether the PC or the Mac has taken an given IP address, and nothing special is set in the router config to favor, or even affect, certain IP addresses or MAC addresses. No rules, no exceptions. It's a fairly vanilla setup.

Just for kicks, try switching the PC to OpenGL mode.

What kind of pings are you getting? (type /ping ingame, I think).
How does that compare to a manual ping of the game server (from the cmd line)?

Are you getting packet loss? (type "ping <ip> /n 100" and see how many packets don't make it).

I'm getting pings ranging in the 50s, usually around 56, but occasionally spiking up to 250 or 400 -- seldom, but seems to coincide with the lagginess. I can't tell because I can't get a constant reading of ping. I have to keep typing "/ping" to get a reading....

What's the IP of the game server? Can't ping it from command without that. Don't know name or IP of it.

I tried switching to Open GL mode [no change] and, while doing that, discovered that I could switch from DirectX 8.something to DirectX 9, so tried all 3 [no change].

Early results suggest lag ... I'm looking into what might be either clogging up my PC's bandwidth to the router or what I could do with wireless link client or router config to maybe ease bandwidth issue for the PC. I'll try some /ping from my Mac, later, cuz now I'm curious about whether the Mac gets same fluctuations in ping to server.