This isn't a change, but it's auxiliary information people may find helpful.
To find out a little more about the network conditions affecting you, look at <http://weather.ten.net/>. Clan Lord is hosted in the pandemonium zone.
This isn't really the place to try to explain how the Internet works, but roughly speaking, there are two things that affect how well your computer can talk with another one: latency and loss. Latency is how long it takes a packet of information to get from one computer to the other. Loss is whether the packet gets there at all. Latency is described in milliseconds (ms), loss in the percent of packets that are "dropped" (missing). A latency of 300 ms or more is a "long time," unless you're trying to reach a machine halfway around the globe. Ideally, loss should always be 0.
"Traceroute" is a utility that tries to send a packet of information from your machine to another one, keeping track of every machine it goes through along the way. "Ping" is a utility that sends a packet to another machine and reports on the latency and loss it gets. If you're experiencing lag, you can try running a traceroute to server.clanlord.com. Then send 100 pings to each machine along the route. If the latency or loss jumps suddenly at one of the steps, that's probably the machine causing the problems. Email the results from the bad machine and the one right before it to Joe at <joe@clanlord.com>, and he'll complain to Clan Lord's ISP so things can get fixed.
If you didn't understand those last two paragraphs, or don't know how to get traceroute or ping utilities, don't worry about it.
Your machine might also slow down if it can't keep up with all the information Clan Lord is sending it, especially when there's a lot going on around you. That feels similar to lag, but it doesn't come from the same thing. Giving the Clan Lord client more memory might help. I'm told that a graphics accelerator can help too, but I haven't checked that myself.
In November 1999, Joe wrote:
Since our maximum packet size is under 600 bytes, and we send 4 packets per second, the most data you can receive is 2400*8 bits -- well under 28.8 kbits.But it is true that those on a 14.4 modem can bog during busy periods. (Aren't decent modems cheap nowadays? I haven't checked recently.)
You can also get reduced frame rate from playing on a very slow (typically under 80MHz PPC or 68K) Mac. Or in millions of colors on a slightly slow Mac.
Any 604 Mac on a 28.8 modem shouldn't have a local cause for slowdown, and the server almost never bogs (until there are about 200 people on), so other slowdowns are almost always caused by internet ugliness somewhere.
Make sure that your computer can talk to the computer running Clan Lord, by pinging server.clanlord.com. If you can't reach that machine at all, either your own computer is set up wrong, there's a problem with your ISP or another system between you and server.clanlord.com, or the machine that Clan Lord runs on has crashed. You can test your computer's setup and the network between you and CL with traceroute and ping. If you're pretty sure from that that the Clan Lord machine itself has crashed, email Joe at <joe@clanlord.com> so he can look into it. It's not very likely, but it has happened.
If you didn't understand that last paragraph, again, don't worry about it.
If you can talk to the Clan Lord server machine well, but you still can't connect to the game, chances are the game's software (also called its "server," confusingly) has crashed. Wait half an hour: it's supposed to restart itself automatically. After that, if it's still down and there's nothing on the CL web page (see above), it's probably worth emailing Joe to let him know.
Compiled and edited by Pamela Greene <pamg@alumni.rice.edu>. Additions, corrections, and suggestions for this file are welcomed!