Alright, I'm trying my damnedest to get Brood War functioning adequately on my Windows 8.1 machine. It seems like every solution to one problem requires conceding another. At first the game felt choppy, but running it with the ddemulate flag fixed that. Then I wanted to have working Bnet menus, so I used window mode in Chaoslauncher... but ddemulate doesn't work within the launcher.
Okay... so I can accept garbled Bnet menus as long as I can play the actual game, but there's one last problem that I feel like I haven't seen mentioned around here. There is a considerable delay when telling a unit to perform an action. I loaded up the game on an old Windows 7 laptop just to make sure I wasn't imagining things. It's not mouse lag. The game responds to my mouse immediately when it comes to animating the reticle whenever I click somewhere on the terrain, but units have what feels like a full second delay before they react to the command.
Has anyone else encountered this?
Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jun 10 2015, 1:59 pm by ScOULaris.
None.
An artist's depiction of an Extended Unit Death
That's game latency. It exists in any multiplayer game. You were likely playing on high or extra-high latency when you were noticing the higher delay.
Game latency is a mechanism used to sync clients without lagging the game. Basically, your actions are queued up and communicated to all other players to be executed on a particular frame. If your connection isn't fast enough to receive everyone's actions, the game waits for you by pausing and bringing up the lag screen for other players. In this scenario, increasing the game latency would reduce or eliminate lag.
The default latency for bnet games is low. LAN games have an extra-low latency that is even more responsive (though the UI still just calls it "low"); you can achieve this in bnet by manually setting a value in memory, but it is regarded as cheating (low-latency hack). Single-Player has no latency, as the mechanism is unnecessary there.
That's game latency. It exists in any multiplayer game. You were likely playing on high or extra-high latency when you were noticing the higher delay.
Game latency is a mechanism used to sync clients without lagging the game. Basically, your actions are queued up and communicated to all other players to be executed on a particular frame. If your connection isn't fast enough to receive everyone's actions, the game waits for you by pausing and bringing up the lag screen for other players. In this scenario, increasing the game latency would reduce or eliminate lag.
The default latency for bnet games is low. LAN games have an extra-low latency that is even more responsive (though the UI still just calls it "low"); you can achieve this in bnet by manually setting a value in memory, but it is regarded as cheating (low-latency hack). Single-Player has no latency, as the mechanism is unnecessary there.
Hm. You think that's all it is? I was experiencing this when playing in solo sessions on Bnet to test out performance, so latency wasn't being affected by any other connections.
One thing that I haven't yet done on my Win8.1 machine is set up the port forwarding rules for Brood War. Maybe once I do that I'll see a reduction in this latency. I remember having severe lag when playing online in Windows 7 on my old laptop until I forwarded the correct ports.
EDIT: Since I have someone's attention (thanks for replying!), I'll throw in another related question. Is there any way to use the ddemulate flag with Windowed mode via something like Chaoslauncher? If I could do that, I think all of my major concerns would be addressed.
None.
You can try
ScQuickLaunch with the arguments:
-ke -de -nl
This will kill windows explorer while StarCraft is open (should help with many graphical issues), run the ddemulate command, and activate NoLatency mode. Remember to unblock the zip file after downloading, like in this example:
Unblock Example
Not sure if it will necessarily solve your menu display issues; let me know the results
AFAIK there is no way to add arguments (like ddemulate) to StarCraft in chaos launcher (the only stable method to run wmode that I know of).
TheNitesWhoSay - Clan Aura -
githubReached the top of StarCraft theory crafting 2:12 AM CST, August 2nd, 2014.
AFAIK there is no way to add arguments (like ddemulate) to StarCraft in chaos launcher (the only stable method to run wmode that I know of).
Yeah, damn. That would be pretty much perfect for my needs if it were possible.
When I get home I'll forward the Brood War ports and see if the latency issue goes away.
None.
An artist's depiction of an Extended Unit Death
I was experiencing this when playing in solo sessions on Bnet to test out performance, so latency wasn't being affected by any other connections.
Latency isn't impacted by other players. It's a setting in Options > Network. It doesn't matter whether you're alone or with 7 other players: if you're on Battle.net, the latency will be the same.
