CEONSS

Dunno where to put this but here goes. I've been having a bug lately that first seems to remove all ammunition visuals from the game and then after a respawn, the whole weapon. I used to get it infrequently but now it's cropping up every 2-3 games and only disconnecting seems to fix it. Does anyone know what could be the cause of this? Just a lag glitch or is it perhaps a Steam bug?

UT's ingame HUD is built around the concept of gradations of relevant information a user can toggle between displaying, from absolutely nothing rendered on top of the world view (also quickly switched to/from with the togglescreenshotmode console command) to all the info (held weapon, health/shield/vec.health, active weap's ammo, selected weap icon, the entire weapons' bar, and maybe the ONS radar too, although the last one has an independent toggle in F12 too). The relevant commands that move you back n' forth along the axis of desired HUD info amount are GrowHUD and ShrinkHUD, and they're typically bound to the minus and equals keys, located right above the bracket keys in most keyboards' alphanumerical section. HUD size changes persist through sessions so check whether you've assigned any of those commands to some key that also has another, more frequent use and you've accidentally switched away from your desired HUD arrangement by pressing it. You can consult your UT System subfolder's User.ini to check the exact, full key bindings. Additionally, HUD size and opacity are configurable from inside the game's settings HUD tab and one of those sliders might've been moved from 100%. Hope that helped.

Weapon visibility isn't tied to ShrinkHud/GrowHud, but there are probably console commands for changing weapon hand (left, right, center, hidden) as well.

I used to get this about a year ago until the server moved, I always thought it was lag. Aren't the weapons server side that's why they don't show up on demos?

Tampeloeres wrote:Dunno where to put this but here goes. I've been having a bug lately that first seems to remove all ammunition visuals from the game and then after a respawn, the whole weapon. I used to get it infrequently but now it's cropping up every 2-3 games and only disconnecting seems to fix it. Does anyone know what could be the cause of this? Just a lag glitch or is it perhaps a Steam bug?

I've had that quite a lot...you fire, but nothing comes out of the gun other than the sound, no one dies when you shoot at them, but you can still be killed. The only solution is to disconnect and reconnect, which is annoying.

I had this long ago 2-3 times when i had too much lag

For me this problem also never had something to do with wrong settings or pressing keys of whose existence you never knew before and which shrink or grow your hud .

The problem appeared some times in the past, always in connection with bad server performance - lags, p/l etc.

First symptom: The overall server performance declines, it gets laggy.
2.: Weapon switching gets slower
3.: The link gun fires in only secondary mode, the beam seems to be "out of phase" or totally vanishes.
4.: None of the weapons fires reliably anymore.
5.: The weapons disappear.

Reconnecting did not help every time.

Another thing i sometimes had on TAM-servers: At the beginning of one round i had no weapon. Backspace key (throw weapon) solved this for me.

But this seems to be another issue.

Make sure you have : ConfiguredInternetSpeed=9500, sometimes it causes some problem of pl, or non-optimization in O.S

I have mine set to 10000 but i think the server has a cap of 9500. I too have had this problem, weapons don't fire, like combos don't show ect. but this only happened when i had 60+ping.

In retrospect, it would seem the gradual worsening of the problem described as "first seems to remove all ammunition visuals from the game and then after a respawn, the whole weapon" from the top of the description threw me off a bit and put me into an offline troubleshooting mindset instead. Ah well, at least some of that might be of help to someone else later on :/.

In terms of online play now, experiencing a delay of up to several seconds (~3-4) between walking over a weap.locker and seeing your arsenal correspondingly expanded is nothing unusual when the server's net resources are placed under some strain; it's right up there with vehicles around you not having their turrets rendered or their weapons' states/animations instated for a brief period. Both those phenomena are related to the server struggling to keep up with a full crowd's packet traffic demands, which is performed in a prioritized fashion to keep more essential info coming in before any other, more ancillary content.
If, OTOH, weapons suddenly stop showing during switching or locker grabs in the middle of a match and that persists even after respawns, yeah, that's an obvious sign the situation's moving towards net performance degradation that will likely only be resolved either through rejoining (for just one affected player) or once the next map loads (if it's more widespread). That's when it's actually the "weapons bug", is my point; not if it's just during the first minute when one enters a particularly busy game session (full crowd in a badly optimized map, etc.). Still, if you say this is happening for you every 2nd or 3rd game, this points more to something wrong with the connection on your end than the server's. Netspeed setting is one, already mentioned, troubleshooting option to explore (although beyond setting it to 10000, I can't think of anything else you could try), but other things you could check out would include your wireless/wired con's reliability, router settings (MTU if on ADSL, any weird QoS settings) and firewall configuration. That's assuming your ISP isn't pulling some kinda funky throttling or traffic is generally congested around your area. If there's problems related to those elements though, they would likely manifest is more pronounced ways than just weapons not showing, but that's all I can think to suggest here.

But hey, at least it's not as bad as trying to respawn in the middle of a match and suddenly finding your client being treated as a weird hybrid between player and spectator (listed in the team roster, but clicking only jumps your view from one teammate to another :s), or having your spec camera locked during round changes. If only the game had enjoyed better favour from Epic, or at least received a few more patches...