If the ships are "jumping", moving suddenly without a smooth flying sequence, from one spot to another it's lag. If NPC's are jumping then not enough location information is available to provide a smooth flying sequence. It may be the server is overloaded. It may be the server internet pipe, anywhere through the internet itself (unlikely) or your own internet pipe bandwidth is maxxed. It may be your 'puter is running full out. It can be a combination of any of these. Ping time just tells you when you are getting the information, not if you are getting all the information.
On my 'puter I can tell when something is slowing down due to CPU utilization because FL's sounds stutters. Also does this spazing out happen in SP? If not then your 'puter can handle FL and shouldn't be the problem.
You may be d/ling or u/ling something at the same time (is a P2P program for example running in the background?) or you use a 56k analog modem connection and thus your internet pipe bandwidth is reduced for FL. Everything else is out of your control.
A friend who used to run Proxima
told me normally you had a fixed u/l and d/l rate between client and flserver for a player flying around normally. This u/l and d/l rate more than doubles for those players that go on a mission. I used to see this on some borderline servers where everything was fine, even during random enemy NPC encounters. But as soon as I took a mission the ships looked like they were stuttering all over the screen and lag indicator would blink.
EDIT: I'm Flight Captain! Yahooo!
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Earendil
SysAdmin of Boston Freelancer server
Edited by - Earendil on 03-11-2003 20:01:24