66 tick > 100 tick

[ZERO]

For a few days now I have been testing the effects of using 66 tick on the servers vs 100 tick. You may be wondering why I would do this and it is pretty interesting. As some of you may know valve removed all tick options from the servers some months ago and the reason for this was to fix hit registration and make it so that 66 tick would have the same reg and accuracy as 100tick. As I do not really trust anything valve says about their updates I decided to use a mod that hacked the game engine so that we could run 100 tick. However tests have shows that this mod not only creates more lag on the server but also the process of running 100tic due to the new way the net code works makes the game play bad. 66 tick on the OB is the same as 100tick from the previous engine. Here are some quotes:

There was a long-standing bug in CS with how the weapon firing rate was calculated. Imagine that the AK fired 6 bullets a second (166ms), and the server updated at 10 frames a second.

Server update 0: 0 ms Firing timer: 0 ms
Server update 1: 100 ms Firing timer: 100 ms
Server update 2: 200 ms Firing timer: 200 ms => *FIRE* => 0 ms
Server update 3: 300 ms Firing timer: 100 ms
Server update 4: 400 ms Firing timer: 200 ms => *FIRE* => 0 ms
Server update 5: 500 ms Firing timer: 100 ms
Server update 6: 600 ms Firing timer: 200 ms => *FIRE* => 0 ms
Server update 7: 700 ms Firing timer: 100 ms
Server update 8: 800 ms Firing timer: 200 ms => *FIRE* => 0 ms
Server update 9: 900 ms Firing timer: 100 ms

As you can see, 33ms of firing time is lost each time the gun fires- it's effectively shooting slower (only 5 hits / second) because of the tick rate of the server. If the server was bogged down or had lot of people on it, the results would be even more unpredictable.

This is why guns operated very differently at different tick rates.

We've updated it to the correct behavior, in which case you'll get:
Server update 0: 0 ms Firing timer: 0 ms
Server update 1: 100 ms Firing timer: 100 ms
Server update 2: 200 ms Firing timer: 200 ms *FIRE* => 33 ms
Server update 3: 300 ms Firing timer: 133 ms
Server update 4: 400 ms Firing timer: 233 ms *FIRE* => 66 ms
Server update 5: 500 ms Firing timer: 166 ms *FIRE* => 0 ms
Server update 6: 600 ms Firing timer: 100 ms
Server update 7: 700 ms Firing timer: 200 ms *FIRE* => 33 ms
Server update 8: 800 ms Firing timer: 133 ms
Server update 9: 900 ms Firing timer: 233 ms *FIRE* => 66ms

This fixes the integration, and regardless of tick rate, the guns will have the same feel. In practice, this made the difference between 8 (33 tick), 9 (66 tick), and 10 (100 tick) bullets per second on the AK. Now they should all be identical.

In order to preserve game play, we timed the guns and dumped out the delta between shots on the old 100 tick servers and the new servers. Every automatic weapon was tested, and then we modified the weapon data to match the old 100 tick results.

After making the changes, we ran through and verified that the firing rate was the same for all automatic guns as it was on 100 tick server before the update.

The final cycle times (in seconds) are given below:

SMGs
MAC-10: 0.075
MP5: 0.08
KM UMP45: 0.105
TMP: 0.07
C90: 0.07

Rifles
AK47: 0.1
Galil: 0.09
552: 0.09
D3/AU-1: 0.25
Scout: 1.25
AWP: 1.455
550: 0.25
Bullpup: 0.09
M4A1: 0.09
Famas: 0.09

Shotguns
M3: 0.88
XM1014: 0.25

Machineguns
M249: 0.08

With this update, all of them should feel like old 100 tick servers.

We also plan on looking at weapon recoil and spread patterns and fixing the integration problems there, as well, but that will be in a later update.

We are doing the work to make the CSS weapon code consistent across server tickrates and client framerates.

We recently released an update that made the guns fire at a consistent rate regardless of server tick rate. Because the guns still fire on ticks and some of the firing rates are not even multiples of ticks a side effect of this change is that the spacing between the bullets is less even.

Making the firing less tick rate dependent is a better solution than just running at a tick rate of 100.

As an example - assume there is a gun that is supposed to fire every 6.5 ticks. In the old code that gun would have fired every 7 ticks with evenly spaced bullets, but on a 100 tick server it would have fired faster (since 10ms ticks can better approximate the underlying firing rate). Another gun that fired every 5 ticks would have fired a little slower on a 100 tick server (because 10ms ticks can't approximate a 75ms firing rate as well as 15ms ticks can since it's an even multiple). Because of this the experience of firing weapons could change dramatically depending on the server you connect to. But in the old code the bullets were always evenly spaced because they were fixed to the nearest multiple of ticks at whatever tick rate the server was running. The framerate on the client matters as well. If you can't run frames as fast as the server's tick rate your client can't always trigger bullets at the correct time either. So when your framerate drops below 66fps (or 100fps on a 100 tick rate server) it affects the feel of the weapons because the sounds are playing with different spacing between the bullets.

When we made the firing rate more independent we also caused the side effect of making the bullets less evenly spaced. Because the sounds are triggered when the bullets are fired this changed the sound of many weapons to be a bit more erratic and different than the sound of either 10ms or 15ms server tick rates. This was pretty noticeable on some weapons but at that point most people were more concerned with the bug we created in that update the made tapping on the fire button shoot differently than it had previously. To address the sound change we added code to accurately place the sounds along the timeline according to the actual firing rate of the gun. In order to implement this the sound engine needs to overlap the sounds because it doesn't have the necessary features to schedule the sounds with sample accuracy and override existing sounds as new ones are played at the same time.

In our other games (e.g. HL2, Left4Dead, Left4Dead 2) this hasn't been a problem and the precise timing is preferred by our audio designers even if it comes with overlap. They simply design the sounds with the overlap in mind. But the counter-strike weapon sounds were not designed with overlap in mind so in the current update they sound different than intended due to the overlapping of subsequent shots.

In the next update we've added features to the sound engine so we can position the sounds correctly in time as well as preserve the original sound design so they will be better in all cases. They'll have the original overlapping behavior and they will be less sensitive to different server tick rates or client frame rates. This is designed to make the feel of the guns more consistent and good in all situations.

Those were from valve this is from the creates of zblock:

100 tickrate causes timing issues with the Source engine, it's the reason we had to release a doorfix (which was a patch only to fix the more visible issue of doors behaving incorrectly).
The other issues you aren't going to see and if you whine about inconsistency in CSS then what can I say...

We are not going to support tickrate changes in our next release.

Note that the info valve is talking about is what the update the came out a long time ago was going to do.

The important thing is that I have tested this out and it is clear that 66 runs better than 100. As a result the servers will soon be switched to 66 tick only. This is to improve game play and reduce lag and increase hit registration.

[StarsMine]

So should we now tell everyone to set their rates to 67?

[VFV]

the server will only allow 66, so it won't matter if our rates are still set for 100. server will only allow 66. it will auto adjust their rates.

[Steamer]

Have been wondering when the server's would be changed over.

The server will not auto adjust your rate. Does Valve still default configs to 33 tick?
As far as rate's go...read up on them and the netcode to configure your own personal rates as everyone's will differ. All this means is the server sends/recieves 66 tick updates per second.

Setting your rate's too high/low will cause you choke, "lag", and other "weirdness". IE: missfireing sound, a slow response in shoot to land and more omfg hax box wall deaths. Lol.

There is much more that effects gameplay than just the tickrate.

[Spasm]

I love 100 tic myself, I can tell a real difference when playing. I guess just getting used to it for so long is part of it. It makes guns shoot a lil faster, seems to increase accuracy, and makes bunny hopping easier for non scripters.

[StarsMine]

Have been wondering when the server's would be changed over.

The server will not auto adjust your rate. Does Valve still default configs to 33 tick?
As far as rate's go...read up on them and the netcode to configure your own personal rates as everyone's will differ. All this means is the server sends/recieves 66 tick updates per second.

Setting your rate's too high/low will cause you choke, "lag", and other "weirdness". IE: missfireing sound, a slow response in shoot to land and more omfg hax box wall deaths. Lol.

There is much more that effects gameplay than just the tickrate.

Default is cmd 30 and update 20 :/

[ZERO]

I love 100 tic myself, I can tell a real difference when playing. I guess just getting used to it for so long is part of it. It makes guns shoot a lil faster, seems to increase accuracy, and makes bunny hopping easier for non scripters.

Actually that is impossible b/c the fire speeds since that update make it so the weapons behave the same regardless of tick. They are not programed the way there were before where they did fire differently under 100 tick. Valve made it so they always fire the same and made it so that the default settings of fire are those of 100 tick pre OB. As a result the only real reason to run 100 tick was under the idea that it provided better hit registration however the game engine is now hard coded to 66 tick and this combined with the changes in net code cause the game to lag and for you to have poor registration on anything other than 66 tick.

The only thing I can say that I have not been able to disprove is that 100tick is better for bunny hopping. If we ran or in the future run a bunny hop server it would be 100tick for this reason as the b hop would be more important than smooth game play or hit registration.

[VFV]

so when is this change going to happen boss?

[ZERO]

All servers are now 66 tick and force a rate to 66-67 for cmd and update rate.

[Spasm]

Actually that is impossible b/c the fire speeds since that update make it so the weapons behave the same regardless of tick. They are not programed the way there were before where they did fire differently under 100 tick. Valve made it so they always fire the same and made it so that the default settings of fire are those of 100 tick pre OB. As a result the only real reason to run 100 tick was under the idea that it provided better hit registration however the game engine is now hard coded to 66 tick and this combined with the changes in net code cause the game to lag and for you to have poor registration on anything other than 66 tick.

The only thing I can say that I have not been able to disprove is that 100tick is better for bunny hopping. If we ran or in the future run a bunny hop server it would be 100tick for this reason as the b hop would be more important than smooth game play or hit registration.

Well I'd say your prob right because other then ibis I don't really play any other server competitively. I do play minigames on SG servers and I know for a fact 66 tic makes it real difficult to bunny hop what so ever. The only people that can do anything with it are using scripts. B hopping isn't a requirement to be good or anything, I just thought it added another dimension to the game play.