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Diary of my meter in Ready Gos.....

• tiffer67 1,764 Posts

  Fri, Oct 8 2010 12:40 PM

  Over the last month I have kept a diary of incidents occuring as a result of a stuttering, freezing and skipping meter during ready go tournaments I've entered. There have been too many to mention below so I've stuck to the incidents that have cost me a lost ball.

  For the record, my pc is above the stated requirements and I clear my cache regularly. I run Gamebooster and try any other tips passed on by other players on these forums.

  Sept 10th Lost ball out of bounds - Meter skip on 16th during 18 Hole St Andrews.

  Sept 14th Lost ball - Meter skip 16th back 9 St Andrews Again!!

  Sept 15th Dubbed snap hook into the burn - Meter freeze 18th 18 Hole St Andrews.

                  Snap hook lost ball - Meter freeze 7th Front 9 Kiawah.

  Sept 20th Out of Bounds lost ball - Meter skip 17th 18 Hole St Andrews.

  Sept 22nd Snap hook lost ball - Meter freeze 7th 18 Hole Kiawah.

  Sept 23rd Snap hook lost ball - Meter freeze 7th St Andrews.

  Sept 28th Snap hook lost ball - 10th 18 Hole Bethpage.

  Oct 2nd Snap hook lost ball - Meter freeze 9th 9 Hole St Andrews.

  Oct 8th Snap hook lost ball - Meter freeze 4th 9 Hole Kiawah.

  So, in the last month I have lost 10 balls on account of a dodgy meter. I am well capable of losing balls without assistance of the meter, the 17th @ Kiawah has a pond full of them. I have no complaints about those even if it proves costly and is incredibly annoying.

  The question it throws out there is that I am but just one player. I certainly am not unique to losing balls this way, I am sure were other players to do a similar diary, they too could report a number of lost balls also.

  Just how much money is WGT making off us players through faults in the game meter? As far as I am concerned they are stealing our money from our very own pockets. This issue, coupled with their pricing policy, imaginary out of bounds that don't exist on the real course, makes me come to the conclusion that they really have no intention of improving this aspect of play. It will cost them way too much in revenue.

  I love this game but the company behind it sucks!

   

• UniBooboo 42 Posts

  Fri, Oct 8 2010 1:49 PM

  What do you believe is the actual problem?  The WGT servers or the WGT Flash software that's loaded into your browser?  And if it is the software what is your guess is the cause ( browser compatibility, memory, so on... )?  Has this always been a problem for you or has it just been since a recent site update? Dose it happen every once in a while, every round, or every swing?

  These are just a few questions Tech would have to ask to narrow down the problem, so maybe list here will help communicate to error.

   

  Unibooboo

   

   

• tiffer67 1,764 Posts

  Fri, Oct 8 2010 2:37 PM

  I have no idea what the problem is. All I know is that it happens. I play a lot, last month wasn't a bad one by any stretch. It used to be a bigger problem until I purchased a new desktop.

  The fact is that this happens and over the course of a year the needless dollars are wasted and I don't believe WGT is doing enough to improve the situation. If they are, then they are very poor at communicating this to the members of the site.

  People just put up with it, it shouldn't be this way.

• bfghd 1,344 Posts

  Fri, Oct 8 2010 2:47 PM

  Tiff, if your meter freezes, don't click. Happpens to me all the time, and it doesn't count as a shot. Hope that helps.

• borntobesting 9,707 Posts

  Fri, Oct 8 2010 3:25 PM

  tiffer67:

  I have no idea what the problem is. All I know is that it happens. I play a lot, last month wasn't a bad one by any stretch. It used to be a bigger problem until I purchased a new desktop.

  The fact is that this happens and over the course of a year the needless dollars are wasted and I don't believe WGT is doing enough to improve the situation. If they are, then they are very poor at communicating this to the members of the site.

  People just put up with it, it shouldn't be this way.

  tiff make sure all your drivers are up to date. 2 or 3 months and most drivers especially your video drivers are out dated. I know it is a hassle to continually have to update your drivers but in the long run it is worth it. Also is your video card in your new Desktop an add-on or an integrated card? Many desktop scrimp on the video card integrated in the motherboard. It is worth the extra $ to add a high end Nvidia or ATI card. The higher frame rate will work better with flash but also will make many other video features work much better.

  Also Game Booster 2 and Leatrix Latency Fix really help smooth the meter as well. As for browsers, Firefox and chrome seem to work the best for playing here.

• tiffer67 1,764 Posts

  Fri, Oct 8 2010 3:47 PM

  Thanks for the advice guys. You obviously think this is something that happens to me nearly every round, it doesn't. When I said I play a lot, I mean a lot, 200 ranked rounds a month approximately. 1 in 20 rounds results in a lost ball from a meter freeze or skip. The point is it shouldn't and if it does, there has to be a better way of dealing with it than the current ah well never mind strategy.

• UniBooboo 42 Posts

  Fri, Oct 8 2010 3:48 PM

  I'm not sure what they could do.   The swing meter is at most I would guess 3 lines of code that exists on your computer and is executed by Adobe Flash within your browser. Again I would guess when you let go of the button to start the swing it starts a counting loop (lets say 0 to 1000 for the full rang of swing) in which every time the loop goes around it checks to see if the mouse button has been pressed and if it has not it adds 1 to the count and repeats.  When you press the button it simply takes that number and uploads it to the WGT physics engine.  When your meter glitches something on your computer has taken priority in your cpu and caused that code to temporarily  to stop.  There is no way to fix this in the code because the program has no way of knowing it happened. It would be the same if time stop then started again, you yourself would have no way of knowing it - from your view it was seamless.  This is, in my view, is the problem with browser based games. Being the browser wasn't really made for this purpose and the computer it runs on isn't set up to expect that it is being used for this.  Unlike a installed game the computer doesn't consider anything the browser might be doing as critical. 

  Here are a couple of possible things that might help:

  1. Stop as many process on your computer as possible to free up as much flash memory as you can.  ( things like auto updates, desktop widgets, virus checker, your not going to get a virus while your playing, just be sure to turn it back on after, and of course any other programs that you might be trying to run at the same time like a media player. )

  2. I'm not sure if windows will actually do this or that if it even means what i assume it does but ... you can try going into the Process explorer ( Control, Alt, Del ) and Setting the Priority for your browser and maybe a plugin-container to High.  Although the computer still might view it as the time to for it to do other things because a little loop like the Meter counter loop is what basically what all programs are doing when idle ( meaning they are in a loop constantly looking for some kind of input from a user )

  This might be more of a problem with Adobe Flash than anything else. 

  I'm just speculating here on most of this because I don't have the actual code and and do not develop for Flash.  And I would love anyone to enlighten me on how I might be viewing this wrong because I actually like this kind of stuff.

  I just see meter glitches as another part of the game I have to master, and I must say I have gotten pretty good at stopping myself from pressing the button when it dose happen.  It is like a Major League Baseball player laying off a curve ball, at first it looks like a good pitch, then he spots it curving out and refrains from swinging.  

  Let me know if anything that I've babbled about helps.   

   

  Unibooboo

• tiffer67 1,764 Posts

  Fri, Oct 8 2010 4:29 PM

  Born, UniBooboo I really appreciate your time and suggestions. I have just updated my Nvidia drivers, so that is something new I hadn't previously been aware of. I take pretty much all the advice going on here but sometimes it just gets me. As I said previously, not as often as you think, more down to heavy usage.

• andyson 6,415 Posts

  Fri, Oct 8 2010 4:48 PM

  Tiffer have you tried setting the affinity of the browser and flash processes to a single "CPU" in your new desktop as outlined in the post here?  Flash appears to not play nice with  multi-threading on new dual core processors.

• andyson 6,415 Posts

  Fri, Oct 8 2010 4:56 PM

  UniBooboo:

  The swing meter is at most I would guess 3 lines of code that exists on your computer and is executed by Adobe Flash within your browser. Again I would guess when you let go of the button to start the swing it starts a counting loop (lets say 0 to 1000 for the full rang of swing) in which every time the loop goes around it checks to see if the mouse button has been pressed and if it has not it adds 1 to the count and repeats.  When you press the button it simply takes that number and uploads it to the WGT physics engine.  When your meter glitches something on your computer has taken priority in your cpu and caused that code to temporarily  to stop.

  Or maybe Flash itself decides to do something else in the 1.5 to 2 seconds of the swing? Maybe process a friend update that's been waiting, or do something with its cache?

  One of the items on the long list of workarounds to minimize meter lag has been to frequently clear your browser cache, not the flash cache.  I wonder why this would help.  Does something happen inside Flash when the cache gets cluttered or full?