I recently shared with you some online tools to help you with your online gaming. This here’s a certain addition to that bunch. We all know how frustrating lag is when playing ANY online game. In my old blog, I wrote some tips on how to reduce the effects of lag.

But this time, some folks at Bigfoot Netoworks have developed an application that they claim can make you understand and combat lag.

It’s called Lagmeter which “gives you the ability to not only measure the Lag you live with in your games, but also to understand where your lag-related problems are coming from. Finally, the causes of your Lag will not be a mystery because LagMeter will tell you if it is your gaming PC, the network, or the gaming server that is giving you grief. Once the causes of Lag are better understood, the gamers, game developers, and hardware manufacturers can work together to provide solutions to our #1 problem.”

This technology, developed by Bigfoot Networks, is a great step for us to be able to fight lag. First we have to be able to measure and understand it, and then we can kick its ass. “Hardcore gamers know that Lag can be caused by many different forces, and that Lag has no formal definition – its a term that gamers use to describe something bad that happens in an online game that is out of their control” said Harlan Beverly, CEO of Bigfoot Networks. “With LagMeter, gamers can quantify and narrow down what is causing Lag in their favorite games.”

Harlan Beverly said the toughest challenge about developing LagMeter was to quantify Lag in a meaningful metric that made sense. “LagMeter solves this by introducing a new metric, Lags per Minute (LPM), which is essentially the number of measurable Lag events in a minutes worth of game-play.”

I still haven’t downloaded or installed this. But I’ll give it a test-run one of these days. Tell me what happens during your own testing. Keen to know if it really works.

GM T