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John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996)

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Re: John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996)

#101

Post by thrower123 »

speedplane wrote: post #28

Why is this article hosted on github? Obviously it wasn't created there as it was written in 1996. Are all the message boards and forums where this type of material was likely posted really defunct or unusable now? Do we now need to rely on enterprising internet historians to find gems on older platforms just to copy them to the newer platforms? Will Github be around in 20 years? Will the next historian have to unear…

Why not? While this is a bit of an exception, given the prominence of the author, most internet content is always at risk of being wiped away from the record. Let a thousand mirrors bloom.

Re: John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996)

#102

Post by CodeArtisan »

Nition wrote: post #15
pvg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wikipedia page has a link to a thingie that says Duke Nukem 3D had clientside prediction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_prediction

I clicked your link and at first kind of brushed it off as dubious since the only linked source is a press article, but the article is an interview with Ken Silverman himself! So that's pretty credible. The source of the released game is available, so it should be possible to check, except that it's a huge mess (check out BUILD.C).[1] Seems weird that no-one has actually verified this when it could be the first game…

in GAME.C

domovethings()

fakedomovethingscorrect()

fakedomovethings()

getpackets()

Re: John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996)

#103

Post by [deleted] »

gameswithgo wrote: post #97
nickjj wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly we live in a world today where some local code editors could really benefit from CSP because they add 100-200ms of latency to every character you press. I'm not sure if it's funny or sad that there's more key press latency typing into most local Electron apps than connecting to a Quake 3 server 200 miles away back when I had 56k dial-up in 2000. If you want to fast forward to today's internet, with an average i…

vs code typing latency is on the order of 50ms. its more than necessary but not as bad as you are implying

[deleted]

Re: John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996)

#104

Post by def_true_false »

robocat wrote: post #9

Complete aside about Carmack and reducing VR latency from https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/226112/How_John_Carmack_... : "He gave the example of increasing the refresh rate on the Gear VR during development. He was working, at that time, with its Galaxy S III phone. Android triple-buffers graphics, inducing a 48 millisecond delay into the system -- making VR impossible. Carmack pulled apart Android to hack that ou…

Is android doing triple buffering wrong? Where does the extra 16ms delay come from?

Re: John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996)

#105

Post by matwood »

usefulcat wrote: post #26
ttul wrote: post #24

“I have a T1 to my house...”

In 1996, one would have been lucky to be able to have ISDN, so having a T1 was more like 'money is no object' territory.

The office of one of my early programming jobs had an ISDN line. I would carry my home desktop into the office to download things/play games.

The next job I had was in a much bigger company, and the office I was in had equivalent of 70+ T1s. Most of those were to support the phone system though.

Re: John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996)

#106

Post by wil421 »

SmirkingRevenge wrote: post #19

Carmack's dotplans are always interesting history to read. If you weren't a gamer (or alive) at the time when quakeworld came around, you might not appreciate how amazing it was for multiplayer games on the internet. On dial-up, you were lucky to have 150ms latency. Before client-side-prediction, that latency applied to every action you took in game, including player movements. Hit the up-arrow, and you wait 150-300m…

I remember when I was a kid in the 90s and my dad connected two computer to play Doom. The connection was so slow it was almost impossible to play. When my brother and I saw each other’s characters walking around my mind was so blown at the time. Really a great memory. Wait, you can play the same game from 2 computers?

Re: John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996)

#107

Post by kmlx »

nickjj wrote: post #88
SmirkingRevenge wrote: post #19

Carmack's dotplans are always interesting history to read. If you weren't a gamer (or alive) at the time when quakeworld came around, you might not appreciate how amazing it was for multiplayer games on the internet. On dial-up, you were lucky to have 150ms latency. Before client-side-prediction, that latency applied to every action you took in game, including player movements. Hit the up-arrow, and you wait 150-300m…

Sadly we live in a world today where some local code editors could really benefit from CSP because they add 100-200ms of latency to every character you press. I'm not sure if it's funny or sad that there's more key press latency typing into most local Electron apps than connecting to a Quake 3 server 200 miles away back when I had 56k dial-up in 2000. If you want to fast forward to today's internet, with an average i…

i discovered recently that there could be some progress to be made wrt latency in editors: https://makepad.github.io/makepad/

// This is Makepad, a work-in-progress livecoding IDE for 2D Design. // This application is nearly 100% Wasm running on webGL.

Re: John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996)

#108

Post by pault »

SmirkingRevenge wrote: post #19

Carmack's dotplans are always interesting history to read. If you weren't a gamer (or alive) at the time when quakeworld came around, you might not appreciate how amazing it was for multiplayer games on the internet. On dial-up, you were lucky to have 150ms latency. Before client-side-prediction, that latency applied to every action you took in game, including player movements. Hit the up-arrow, and you wait 150-300m…

The worst part was having a 200ms ping and getting constantly smoked by the guy with the sub-100ms ping. Hence the acronym LPB (low ping bastard).

Re: John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996)

#109

Post by sly010 »

devit wrote: post #45
SmirkingRevenge wrote: post #19

Carmack's dotplans are always interesting history to read. If you weren't a gamer (or alive) at the time when quakeworld came around, you might not appreciate how amazing it was for multiplayer games on the internet. On dial-up, you were lucky to have 150ms latency. Before client-side-prediction, that latency applied to every action you took in game, including player movements. Hit the up-arrow, and you wait 150-300m…

You can't really do prediction if you are not rendering the game locally, so all you can do is have a lot of servers all over the world and rely on most customers having a low latency fiber link.

TVs has been so slow for so long anyway. I suspect we will just have a ton of point and click style games or games that are mostly simulations with relatively uninteresting inputs but with potentially bigger visuals, or casual games where even 300ms+ latency doesn't make much of a difference. For better or worse, reflex (time) based games will just not be played on Stadia by serious gamers. We have VR for that now.

Re: John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996)

#110

Post by pault »

> If it looks feasable, I would like to see internet focused gaming become a justifiable biz direction for us. Its definately cool, but it is uncertain if people can actually make money at it.

Classic! Reminds me of the time I told my dad I wanted to make websites for a living and he replied "hey, that's pretty cool, but I don't think there's enough work available to make it a full time career". (This was circa 1996)

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