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THE ISSUE AT HAND:
Let me set the scene:
I'm flying along, eager for battle after spending 45 minutes on standby. hehe.
Suddenly, my gaame stops. Not a freeze, but it simply stops showing motion. It becomes a slideshow for a little while and then (ZOOOOOOM), I shoot past everybody in my squadron at a ka-jillion miles per hour with little to no control of my aaircraft whaatsoever.
Now, to everybody in 5th, this looks like your bog-staandard rubber-banding issue. Which is why for the laast few weeks, I have taken steps to improve my internet connection. Currently, my router is aat the other end of the house (not ideal), aand has been there for the last 2 years - yet I have only started experiencing these issues recently.
Nevertheless, I have tried TP-Link ethernet boxes that plug into the mains, a new aerial for my Wi-Fi card (since I snapped the last one when building the new PC) and essentially everything short of running a 60m ethernet cable through the entire building.
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ADVICE FROM 5TH:
Muddy, in his infinite wisdom it seems, has given quite a few pointers in terms of tracking packet loss; using the cmd_prompt to monitor my ping levels, as that would insinuate the cause of my problem. With the TP-Link boxes, connection was stable-ish, but more prone to dropping out and, consequently, I have been running the Wi-Fi aerial for the last couple of weeks as a backup - so essentially my setup apart from brand new PC and parts is unchanged since 2019.
This mission was the worst of the bunch and I was very fortunate that the game was just playable for me to turn around and abort my flight without posing a risk to my flight or 5th itself.
However, this time I had the cmd_prompt open monitoring ping and even did a speed test for good measure before running the game that night. It is worth also mentioning that the house is usually empty after 7pm on Sunday as my parent go to quiz nights, so bandwidth shouldn't be a factor.
When the issue started happening, cmd_prompt listed my ping at 12ms. And was relatively consistent ranging between 8 and 15 throughout. Sometimes going as low as 5 and as high as 50 for one tick. there was one instance of dropout, that happened twice in 3 seconds but was otherwise very stable and can't have contributed to 30 minutes of non-stop banding as I tried to return to Abbeville. So in my eyes, packet loss isn't the cause of the problem. I also did a speed test and I registered 14mbps. A stretch from my usual 23mbps but still stable enough for online gaming.
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ATTEMPTS AT TROUBLESHOOTING MYSELF:
I decided to go a bit further post-mission and joined Finnish Virtual Pilots which has a player count of 76 at the time and then a further spout on Combat Box which has 82 players online. Both of these servers had DOUBLE the player count of the ACG server at the time of 5th's sortie (around 35 players when I left) and yet, I had no banding issues at all on both instances. Even before the mission, we were on Combat Box Training / Dogfight with no issues at all (although the player count was 7 so its not a fair comparison).
After further discussion, Welshy put forward the possibility of file corruption and that I may need to run a fresh install of IL2 BOX, which I am downloading at the time of writing this post.
Furthermore, that fact I was running TacGrab may be a factor, despite the fact I have been doing this for a good 18 months to date (my point is, setup wise, nothing has changed recently other than me upgrading my PC).
The only other query is the server itself. If I recall, it is a North American server. Again, surely that would mean I face this issue religiously, rather than the last 5 missions. So maybe mission size? Is my game simply trying to load too many assets at once? I would've thought other people would experience similar issues if this were the case.
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BLOODY HELL, AM I STILL TALKING? I SHOULD PROBABLY WRAP IT UP:
As you can probably tell, I'm no expert and my attempts of finding a solution consists of these wild stabs in the dark at possible solutions to discuss. I would appreciate a discussion or some ideas to try no matter how wild. because, as it stands, I cannot put my squadron in jeopardy during formation flying due to my erratic plane movements. Let alone, as Schwarmfuhrer, put my wingmen in danger as they try and stay with something that makes the 262 look slow (ha ha that was a joke, I expect you to laugh).
I welcome any feedback.
Cheers,
~ Firefly
