Lackey on a slower connection?

[shadowcrunch]

Hello all! I've been wanting to get serious in lackey and actually play some games of magic (rather than just making decks), but around 75% of my online gaming time is on a laptop with my 3G cell phone as a modem. It's faster than dialup, but slower than DSL. I hate getting into a game and finding out later that I'm lagging out the other player(s), so I was hoping if anyone out there has ever tried lackey online with a less-than-ideal connection. Anyone have any idea how well it would work? Thanks in advance!

[whizzerd]

i live in a rural area and only have access to the internet through crickrt wireless on my laptop, which is far less than an ideal connection. even after my 5gb monthly limit when it slows me down to around 56k i've never had any problems w/ playing games on lackey

[Trevor]

As long as you connection doesn't break, even a very slow connection is sufficient to play games. Lackey uses very little bandwidth. If you go offline completely periodically, that's a different story. The new lackey has better error correction in that regard though.

[TheBuck]

Can you give us a rough E.T.A on the new lackey?

[Trevor]

Can you give us a rough E.T.A on the new lackey?

It's being tested now.

[TheBuck]

Well played.

[Frizzler]

Hi,

yes, Lackey works even with a 56k connection.
But you need a good graphics card.

I have two questions for Trevor or anyone else who can help:

1) As Lackey was running extremely slow with my old vga on board graphics card, I recently installed a 'new' agp 2x graphics card.
Everything is now running smoothly on my computer, except for Lackey; when starting, only the upper blue frame shows up, with 'SDL' written in it. After two seconds, it disappears. So Lackey now crashes right on startup, even with the sample plugin (war3000). I could switch to gccg or magic workstation, but a new virtual expansion of my favourite game (Netrunner) has been released, and it is not possible to add custom cards with gccg or mws.
Anyone experienced this issue and knows how to fix it?

2) Will the "european keyboard bug" be fixed with the new version (on a qwertz-keyboard, z and y are swapped and all the special characters as well)? This would be great.

Cheers, Frizzler

[Alastair]

If you're running a 2x agp card now, likely it was a downgrade from whatever your onboard was (at least if your board was made within the last 5ish years). Then you also run into things like improper drivers, etc... It's hard to nail down just what your problem is without more info. What's the video card you installed? Driver version on it?

[Frizzler]

Hi Alastair,

my agp graphics card is NVIDIA GeForce2 MX; the driver is from NVIDIA, version 5.3.2.0.
It is quite old, but my old onboard vga graphics card is certainly slower and older (bought it in december 2001) and Lackey worked with it (well, it was very slow).

[Alastair]

Wow, haven't seen an old Geforce2 in a long time I think Trevor could probably tell better as he's the one who has written Lackey, but it's possible that a card that old doesn't have quite the right feature set. Of course it's also possible that it's a bug which has been fixed in the new version of Lackey. As has been mentioned in several other threads, the new version has alot of performance improvements in it as well as a completely new network core. It is currently undergoing private testing on a few different systems and configurations and Trevor will hopefully be able to release it to the public soon.

[Frizzler]

Hi Alastair,

thx for your hint concerning the graphics card driver: I updated to a newer driver version and Lackey now works! After a first solo test game, it seems to run much faster than with my old graphics card.

Looking forward to the new Lackey version anyway, Frizzler