More trouble with Half Life based multiplayer!!!

[Jeff7]

First CS died on me and won't connect. Now half life has turned against me after a single MP game. Now when I hit the Update button, the little window of servers downloaded pops up for a fraction of a second, then the status at the bottom of the screen says "finished downloading list of servers." Problem is, it won't try any other servers to get lists of gameservers. So in short, it thinks it's downloaded the entire list of ZERO gameservers, so it just sits there then. What's going on now? This is a fresh reinstall of Half Life!

 

[Mitzi]

I had a similar problem at a LAN party I went to a few weeks back - I couldn't see any game servers, even though they were up.

Don't know if it will help you but what I did was remove my Local Area Network Connection from under Network and Dial-up Connections, and reconfigure my network settings again, after a reboot all the game servers appeared no problems.

 

[Jeff7]

Next suggestion?

Thanks for trying though, Mitzi.

 

[Jeff7]

AAAAAAAHHHH! It's happening again!!!!

I just got a new motherboard, so I wiped out Windows and reinstalled it and all of half life. I'm running Win98SE, updated, and a GF2 Ti with the 27.42 Dets, and I'm running CS/HL in OpenGL mode. I played CS just fine yesterday, and one round today. Now, it has a lot of trouble even downloading a list of servers using the Update option, and it times out when I try to join any of the ones listed. What the heck gives here?? Half Life has been updated, and I'm running the CS Mod v1.3.

 

[sandorski]

I dunno for sure, but the Valve servers go down once and awhile. So they might be down now.

 

[Jeff7]

This isn't limited to just the Valve servers; this applies to any game server I try to connect to. And it's been like this since I made the preceding post.

 

[sandorski]

HalfLife always checks the Valave servers for authentication before starting, so if they go down HL multiplayed goes down.

 

[Jeff7]

Well in that case, they were down for about 2 months continuously for me. I kind of doubt that is the problem.

 

[Jeff7]

This is how unpredictable it is:
I was playing CS just fine for the past hour or so. I exited the server and looked for another one (lagspikes). It wouldn't let me join any others - kept timing out. Then I tried to update the list of servers - "couldn't get list of servers."


Added info as of edit time below: I just tried CS again. I hit Update, and it got the list of servers. I then tried several of the ones listed - it tried for 10 seconds each, and timed out on each one. I have the following filters:
Are Responding
Responded quicker than 250ms
Are Playing game Cstrike
Are not spectator proxies

 

[Confused]

There is a bug with the filter settings on CS that when you select any ping time, it will default to 100

Try turning this off and see if it helps

ConfusedBW

 

[HotWire]

Sounds like for some reason it is keeping your past exited game open in the background.......check and see what programs are running in the background! When leaving a game use the console and type "quit" to exit the game or back all the way out of the game back to your desktop then try and reconnect again.

 

[Jeff7]

I noticed that; along the bottom, the pingtime is still set to 250. Disabling that box too has no effect. The filters only apply to servers that have been 'downloaded/contacted' - it has trouble even doing that most of the time.

Exiting out of the game doesn't help much either. And the console is a whole other issue.


Added: Here's proof that it's not an exited CS game running in the background:
Ran the game.
Hit Update.
Got list of servers quick.
3 were left after the filter, and all were either full, or had too few people playing.
Hit Update again.
Could not get list of servers.

There never was a game of CS at all in this scenario.

 

[Jeff7]

Back to the top. Anyone have any suggestions?

 

[HotWire]

Do you have your setting for the task bar set on "always on top"?

 

[HotWire]

system specs?

 

[Jeff7]

System specs
Edit: It's the top one, Falcon.

Yes, the taskbar is set to Always on Top, HOWEVER, it is always set to that and I have NEVER had a problem with it in any other game, not even with HL or CS while the console is disabled - leads to the conclusion that something is wrong with CS that won't let the game stay on top with the console enabled.

 

[Kazi]

sounds like a 56k issue, not a PC Mobo problem. Check your 56k modem and for god sakes, get cable/dsl lol But using the Update option, and it times out when I try to join any of the one sounds like a connection problem. Find a server and goto run type "ping xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -t" where x is the IP number and let it go for a while. If it jumps all the sudden or you get no response then its connection issue.

 

[Jeff7]

sounds like a 56k issue, not a PC Mobo problem. Check your 56k modem and for god sakes, get cable/dsl

That's the sad thing - I do have a cable modem.

Other problem - once I hit Update, I can't get any server info. If I try to join, it times out. If I try to get server info, it times out. I can exit immediately and come online with no problem - usually here to report the problem status.

 

[nater]

use gamespy?

 

[Jeff7]

Downloading gamespy now.
I still wonder though what happened to make CS just stop working like this?



Just setup and ran Gamespy. It's downloading the list of servers. It took 2 minutes so far to get the list; it's got 4 now listed, out of 5017, so it's downloading REAL slow. Plus the servers it is listing don't have anyone playing.
Geez, I just want it to go back to the way it was when it did work. Wonder what the heck happened to make it stop working for me.


Another Update: Gamespy didn't do anything for the problem. In CS though, after trying 7 times to enter a server, it let me in. I was then able to play for about 10 seconds before getting kicked. I tried a few others, and they let me in - for about 10 seconds each, then I was booted again. AAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

 

[2cool4u]

gotta hate when you have the urge to play cs and it just don't wanna connect. that happened to me, but it was my stupid firewall. Ever since school put in the dual DS3 lines, they put servers like valve on LOW LOW priority, i'm lucky to get 400 ping. isn't that sad? i also download from audiogalaxy @ 14 bytes per second...thats' with dual ds3 lines. i hate priority

 

[AAman]

since you bumped my for sale thread

1. get latest firmware for router if you're using one (my linksys had firmware update
that listed counterstrike as one of the reasons)
2. I make shortcuts to my favorite servers, so I can just click on them and go right there
3. zonealarm or other firewall- get the latest version, or disable it while playing
4. turn off any filesharing programs or set the to minimal load/upload
5. get rid of windows 98 and try windows 2000 if your hardware supports it (I hate MS, but
windows 2000 is pretty good with all the patches out now)
6. check the driver for your ethernet card, especially if MS update installed a new one
7. cry, pray, cry, in any order, as many times as you need to

 

[Jeff7]

1. Done it.
2. Tried it. Once I get in the server, the connection dies within a few seconds, and then I can't get back in to any server or Update the server list.
3. Zonealarm: I uninstalled it; no effect.
4. No filesharing programs running
5. Well, it did work for quite awhile under Win98 until it just decided to die one day for no reason. Plus, I am not really a Win2k fan I guess. Don't know how well my hardware would be supported either.
6. Got the latest drivers for the NIC from Realtek. (8139B card)
7. Crying, begging computer to work, sacrificing various CD's to it, massaging it.......



I've already tried connecting the modem directly to the computer with Zonealarm uninstalled. That didn't do anything. I mean, come on, it was doing this awhile ago; I reinstalled Windows, Half Life, and Counterstrike, and it still was screwed up.:Q

 

[AAman]

the only other thing I can do is steer you to the half-life/cs forum boards, when I have problems usually
someone else has the same one, and sometimes even a solution.

good luck, I'm usually on fatal mistake if you ever get it working again.

 

[Jeff7]

I already posted in the forums at counter-strike.net with no responses yet.