Confusing HUD Item

[AHadley]

On occasion, I start a game and I get a nice little data box with what appears to be some form of chart in the corner, just above the objective box. What is it and is there a toggle command for it?

[Tempest Storm]

IIRC, that is the Histogram. game.histogram should toggle it on/off when entered in the console.

[Nielk1]

and gameprefs.histogramx, gameprefs.histogramy to move it while still in game.

[AHadley]

Well, it doesnt show anything of any use to me at the moment, so I think I'll just turn it off for now

[Feared_1]

It's quite useful. It helps you figure out when people are lagging or when the connection is bad, etc. I like to have mine on.

[Zero Angel]

The text with a black background wont be useful to most people but the green bars might.

The top area of green bars shows network traffic as it pertains to BZ2. When the bars are small and even that means that network traffic is flowing smoothly and you won't notice any adverse effects from lag -- with they are absent that means that theres no game (multiworld) traffic flowing between you and the other players and the game is "flatlined". The longer a game is flatlined the greater the chance that the game will lag out -- and if it doesnt lag out then the longer the game is flatlined than the bigger the resynch is going to be when it eventually comes.

The bottom area of green bars shows how strained your CPU is -- when the bars are of even length everything is running smoothly. When the bars are larger that means your CPU is starting to become strained. Sometimes a process outside of BZ2 (like an antivirus) will cause the game to become choppy and these bars will start to behave strangely.

I turn on the histogram whenever I think there might be a problem with the game. Usually in game strangeness like ships warping around can be attributed to lag which is shown on the histogram.

[AHadley]

My CPU is choppy all the time, and I've got my techniques for making it better, most of it is just background noise. And since I was in IA at the time, there shouldn't really have been any network traffic from BZ2...

[Zero Angel]

Oh I guess it simply shows how in synch the game thinks it is. I just know that in a multiplayer game, its a VERY good indication of how much lag is in the game.

[TheJamsh]

Im just trying to figure out why on earth it randomly comes up during IA mode?

sure you havent changed anything in gameprefs of localprefs AHadley?

[AHadley]

Don't know where to find them, what file format they are, what they're for, which would make modifying them an exceedingly stupid thing to do.

In other words... oh, damn it... what's the word...

Oh, yes.

No.

[Zero Angel]

Try pressing the 'home' key and see if it toggles it for you. If you're using the allinone for example then it will have newkeys built in which assigns the home key as histogram toggle.

[TheJamsh]

oh i see...

[AHadley]

I'm using DutchBoy's NewKeys mod, but the Home key isn't marked as doing anything on the new Help Card.