Ok here's some more good game setting tips:
1. I see alot of you guys' screenshots, and notice in most of them that you guys have your weapon hand on the right-side. This is a no no. Set your weapon hand to middle. This will help you stay on target better, just like looking down the sights on a real gun.
2. Do you hate running over DP power-ups or picking up a crappy gun in the middle of a fight and having it switch? Well in UTF there is no option in the console for never switch weapon on pickup like in EDM. What you need to do is pick a key, and bind the command "neverswitchonpickup 1" The only problem with this is that every map change it disables this command, so you will have to remember to hit the key. Also, (and I can already hear Glen getting on me about this lol) is you can use this command in combination with your throw weapon key for fast weapon switch. When you throw the weapon, it automatically goes to your highest priority weapon. For example lets say you have ASMD, Flak Cannon, Razorjack and Rifle. You are currently using the Flak and have one shell left, so you hit your throw weapon key, and it will very quickly give you the rifle while still letting you keep the Flak. If you hit throw weapon again, it will go to the next high priority weapon and since the game sees that you just threw your rifle, it will give you the Razorjack. This will not work without the neverswitch command as it will give you the highest prioirty weapon and thats it. Now there's more to this, and I don't use it, but you can go into Adv. Options and change your weapon priorities. Default priorities are DP, Automag, Stinger, ASMD, 8Ball and so on. Well you can put all the weapons you never use in the lowest priority slots, and your favorites in the higher slots. For instance, lets say you hate the Biorifle and Razorjack, well put them in the #1 and 2 slots, that way you will never switch to them when using the throw weapon key. Also take note that you must be running forward or at a positive (forward) strafe for this to work. Running backwards will throw the weapon on the ground.
3. Mouse sensitivity. Everyone's settings are different because of the windows settings. So if Glen says he runs his at 10 and you change to that value, you may find that it is not what he is really running. My personal setting is 1, yes 1. If I take my mouse and move it sideways until I hit 90 degrees from where I was originally, my mouse moves 1.5 inches. The lower you go in mouse sensitivity, the more accurate you will be because it will feel more steady. You dont want it so low though that you knock everything off your desktop while trying to do a 180 degree turn heh.
4. Dodging. Gosh, I don't know why everyone is so afraid to try dodging. It is THE MOST BENEFICIAL movement in the game. I'm sure some of you guys watch me and think "God, this guy must be on crack. He's all over the place." The fact is I play very laid back believe it or not. You'd be amazed at how much distance you can cover when you dodge, and there's also a little secret to it as well which I'll get to soon. Dodging, for any newbies wondering, is when you tap your movement keys twice as fast as you can. You don't have to be stationary when you do it, you can do it while moving, and with practice you can do it all the time when moving. The secret in this game is to NEVER stand still at all. Dodging off of platforms is also a great way to get to another area that is far away and/or escape Turok's Eightball massacres
Also, it is very hard for people to hit you while you are in the air, but for you, it is very easy to hit people that are on the ground. Now to the little "secret." Everyone knows you can dodge forward, but that is just about useless in DM and hard to do. To dodge forward onto something, turn your mouse 90 degrees to the destination and dodge where you want to go. While in air point your mouse forward so when you land you can pop Sparky's head off with the rifle
Also, when running forward, turn your mouse to the left or right between 45-60 degrees and at the same time while doing this, dodge in the opposite direction. So if you turn left, dodge right. Just as soon after you hit the dodge, point your mouse in the direction you were heading. Continuously doing this will allow you to get somewhere 2-3 times as fast as just running.
* On a special note to number 4, I have had a few people tell me that I either dissappear briefly when midway through dodge and when I move fast. This is on their end. Most likely their software rendering, settings and/or computer can't keep up with the speed. If you are running at anything below 25 FPS, your computer just can't handle OpenGL or D3D rendering. Glidewrapper or software rendering will cure this and give you better FPS, just won't look as pretty. Ideal FPS is between 60-90. My computer runs at 78-85 FPS using openGL and 1152 x 1024 resolution. Also, a lot of you tend to mistake this dodging speed as me sliding. I rarely slide in Newbies server anymore, and if I do then it is subconcious and I'm sorry.
5. In regards to maxclientrate, the higher the netspeed the better. Glen argues with me about this, and I respect his opinion, but a netspeed of 20000 will generally give you better results. Stunner is also an advocate of this. In Unreal Gold, default netspeed for cable/DSL is 15,000.
Here is a very good informative atricle from HLK website (sorry can't post a link to atricle):
From a player only perspective, the only thing that is interesting here (other than ping and pl, of course) is bytes/sec. This will always be capped by your netspeed (with a very few rare exceptions). For OUT side, it should actually NEVER exceed netspeed - because that is what the frame cap is for. If this reaches your netspeed on IN side, you might start missing out some information. If that happens only rarely in extreme situations, it's no reason to worry; however, if its a permanent condition, you might miss important data the server cant send you because your bandwidth is saturated. This usually happens due to unreasonably high tickrates on server side.
Tickrate basically is the "fps" the server is running at. It's basically the most important variable a server admin can change. There is a tradeoff here - higher tickrate means more cpu load and more traffic server->client, but also means better pings (both in display and effective) and generally a more precise simulation on the server.
The default tickrate (20 for internet servers) is what causes the horrible ping in stat net display - when the server runs at 20 ticks a second, that also means it can take up to 1/20th of a second before it can acknowledge a ping from a client - that means 50 ms! This also affects gameplay - having a server run at tickrate 20 means that player commands have to wait for 50 ms in worst case before they can actually affect gameplay. And aiming becomes less accurate - just think of playing with 20 fps. If you move your mouse fast, there are large "jumps" in your viewrotation at these low values, and that is exactly what the server will do with your aiming if it is running at such a low tickrate, causing "gaps" in your aiming movement. This is also the cause for the seemingly increasing damage for the continously firing weapons (pulse secondary and minigun) - aiming just gets more precise, causing more of the actually single shots to hit the target.
In the last year, server admins seem to have discovered that at a large scale. However, some of them went too far when fixing that misconfigured default setting - you can find servers running at tickrate 100 out there. Now while that is fine for people with a lot of bandwidth (as long as the server cpu and network connection is capable to sustain it), it is NOT fine for the average ISDN player.
The server->client traffic increases nearly at the same rate as the tickrate does, and tickrates of 100 generate too much traffic for a 64 kbit isdn line. That results in either packet loss (if maxclientrate on server is high enough and netspeed of the client is set to more than the line can actually handle to increase fps rates - see above for that..) or in the client missing game information ranging from decals to really important stuff like player movement.
On a sidenote - the reason for "f1-ping" being lower than stat net ping is simple: most clients will run at more fps than the server. That means the server will get an acknowledge to a ping request faster than the client will get it from the server - he just has to wait 1/fps seconds (plus the actual icmp ping, of course). For some strange reason (probably an attempt to filter out those dependencies) the client substracts half its frame-time (1/fps) from its own ping - that is why you'll always see a lower ping on your own machine than others will see for you.
There is one thing left to mention about packets/sec - if your fps get lower than this, you will most probably experience lag; this is the situation called "invisible packet loss" because it feels exactly like pl, but no pl is shown. I've yet to see that phenomenon myself, but it seems that UT has problems with handling two waiting packets in one frame. No solution is known to this - I'd suggest tweaking your UT for more fps. If you're willing to give up the "looks", there are many ways to improve your fps. Try one of the many many UT tweaking guides out there. Or buy a faster machine.
I'll post more tips as I think of them