So ever since I have started playing SK there have been several scenarios where I get severly choppy gameplay, to the point that it is impossible to play. It started with fire, as that was the first thing that I ran into. Eventually I turned my graphics to the bare minimum and play at the lowest possible resolution in windowed mode, and that lets me play in most flame rooms outside of FSC.
Through trial and error I have narrowed down the other times I experience un-playable game latency / low fps. When my party-mates are using argent peacekeeper or the antigua line guns (the ones that drop shells and have 6 bullet clips) and the blitz needle gun (not sure about autogun or fiery pepperbox, as have not been able to test that with more than 1 in a party).
This generally only happens if there are 2 or more people in the party and if there are 2 or more guns. By myself with my Argent Peacekeeper I can do it to myself when combined with most of the more flame intensive rooms in FSC.
Why is this an issue? It must be related to the network coding, as it appears that most people don't have this problem. My computers are fantastic machines and run the latest games at high settings. I play in the US battle.net from Finland so I know it's not my network connection. The only thing I can fathom is that it is Java on the Mac platform, but recently I was able to duplicate most of this from a gaming PC (at a different location).
Any other steps I can take aside from hoping OOO gets their act together and works on their net-code or buys some European servers?
The guns have muzzle flashes and lingering smoke effects related to them, and fire pits are more like rapid sprites.. both of which shouldn't have any major relation to netcode. It is known that ATI drivers have issues with this and several other OpenGL games (from 11.3 up). You could try playing with around with the driver settings (come to think of it, I think anyone tried completely disabling Catalyst AI yet), but I haven't seen anyone do in-depth testing yet.