[marmusman]

In HL, the list of dogfight servers running on the left have bars to indicate ping levels. Some are red to indicate "timeout".

Is there a way to increase the amount of time before time-out?

Other option, if I were to connect to one of these servers via direct IP from within IL-2 game, how to increase the timeout time? Does it need to be server side or client side? or both? BTW - trying to connect to my dedicated server (runnning at my house) from my work, which is only 20 miles away but I keep getting timed-out. (I have been able to do this with other games (Quake3) but IL-2 won't let me do it). Other people on HL have no problem connecting to the server and I have no problem connecting to other server that are half way across the world.

Thanks

[Redwulf__32]

The red bars indicating "timeout" in HL are IMHO meaningless. If a server has "reply to ICMP" switched off (most have for obvious security reasons) you'll get the red bars no matter how low their latency actually is.

On another note, the aping.exe that HL launches for this purpose also chews up another 30 valuable MBs of memory whether you're in a game or not (using 30MB for what should be a simple 3 lines of code PING application does seem a bit stiff, I wonder what freight train they latched on that application?).

My advice? Disregard the bars. Using "ping" to measure connection quality is a thing of the past, a blowback from the days of IPoCP (IP over Carrier Pidgeon), semaphore flags, jungle drums, smoke signals, loud horns and bonfires on mountain tops.

If you have trouble connecting to your own server from work, it's probably not a "ping" issue but more likely your friendly company network joey/manager that has blocked all outgoing ports except the bare necessities.

[marmusman]

Thanks for your input.

I understand what you are saying about the uselessness of the red bars. I may not have been clear on what my question is. When you connect to a game in IL-2, the computer (client) waits to hear back from the other computer (server). That wait is a certain length of time. Is there a way to increase that time? Would it do anything to help if I am getting a timeout? Does the change have to be made to HL.ini, IL-2 client setup files or IL-2 server files?

Thanks.

[Redwulf__32]

Thanks for your input.

I understand what you are saying about the uselessness of the red bars. I may not have been clear on what my question is. When you connect to a game in IL-2, the computer (client) waits to hear back from the other computer (server). That wait is a certain length of time. Is there a way to increase that time? Would it do anything to help if I am getting a timeout? Does the change have to be made to HL.ini, IL-2 client setup files or IL-2 server files?

Thanks.

Ok, I understand now.

No, I do not think there is any way you can increase the timeout limit in IL2 (it's not a HL issue). Hit Join to try again. Most likely the server is overloaded, quite a lot of data has to be downloaded from the host to all players joining - if he/she has limited uplink bandwidth, patience is the name of the game.

Hope this helps...

[marmusman]

Thanks for the help. After some more testing, i discovered that I can't hook up to any game servers on HL from work. Must be a firewall issue.