John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996) • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by staunch » Wed, May 15, 2019, 5:24 PM UTC

reifiedgent wrote: post #141

pedrocr wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>200ms latencies are not uncommon Those numbers match my experience a long time ago with Quake3 based games where you'd pick servers that are local to you and get 10-40ms latencies. > He designed for I didn't forget the > It seems more likely to me that perception on what an acceptable hand to eye latency is has changed, just like the perception on acceptable frame rates. Right, makes sense that the expectation today…

NQ (NetQuake, as the original Quake is sometimes known) 'feels off' on just 10ms. Movement becomes slightly just out of sync with your input. 10-30ms is a bit optimistic, depending on how large you define a geography. Many ADSL/VDSL connections, best case, start with 5ms of latency, and often higher (say 20ms) due to interleaving. Cable tends to be around 10ms IIRC but can suffer from significant jitter which makes t…

NetQuake feels excellent at < 30ms. Even higher is easy to get used to with some practice because it's extremely predictable due to a lack of CSP. And yes, the solution is to have servers within ~500 miles of players so ~20ms avg ping is the norm. Most gamers have cable not DSL connections.

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

#152

Post by staunch » Wed, May 15, 2019, 5:40 PM UTC

uasm wrote: post #67

staunch wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's kind of sad and funny is that these assumptions changed again and no one seemed to have noticed. We're not on PPP or SLIP connections anymore and yet game devs are still writing netcode as though we are. Client side prediction should have been a temporary hack until low latency connections were mainstream not a permanent aspect of all gaming netcode, and yet it is. Maybe Carmack will wake everyone up again and…

> "We're not on PPP or SLIP connections anymore and yet game devs are still writing netcode as though we are." Your average multiplayer today is significantly more complex than Quake. More data needs to pass through, at higher rates. The network is still very much a bottleneck.

Fair point but bandwidth has also increased from 56 kbit/s 100,000 kbit/s. CPUs have had similarly massive increases in speed as well.

A lot of the extra bandwidth usage is also probably in large part due to sloppiness. John Carmack did some impressively smart things in Quake Live to reduce bandwidth usage. I doubt most modern games like PUBG are anywhere near as optimized.

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

#153

Post by keerthiko » Wed, May 15, 2019, 6:10 PM UTC

staunch wrote: post #148

instantwhat wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go listen to actual competitive FPS players, and hear them complain about having 60 ms latency. Listen to them complain about living on one U.S. coast and playing on servers on the opposite one and having 80-100 ms latency. Listen to players in EU who play on NA servers because they don't like players' behavior on EU servers, and they're willing to suffer 150 ms latency. Then visit Australia and listen to players who…

This is why you ping restrict servers. There's no way to make a game competitive when one player has 10ms ping and another has 100ms (10x higher!) ping. It's just bad for everyone. Which is exactly what competitive Quake Live players do and I suspect CS players probably do. Every player has 15-40ms ping and it's amazing .

I don't get it, many people want to play a game and there just aren't enough players in their city, games want as many players as possible to be playing them.

Your requirement that games ping-restrict servers is an absolute non starter: unless the game is already guaranteed to have hundreds of players active and available near any given player at any given time of day, and evenly distributed redundant always-up servers that scale for demand near every player cluster across the planet. I think CSP is a far more realistic solution to giving a good player experience than magicking player base activity and distribution

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

#154

Post by staunch » Wed, May 15, 2019, 6:21 PM UTC

keerthiko wrote: post #153

staunch wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why you ping restrict servers. There's no way to make a game competitive when one player has 10ms ping and another has 100ms (10x higher!) ping. It's just bad for everyone. Which is exactly what competitive Quake Live players do and I suspect CS players probably do. Every player has 15-40ms ping and it's amazing .

I don't get it, many people want to play a game and there just aren't enough players in their city, games want as many players as possible to be playing them. Your requirement that games ping-restrict servers is an absolute non starter: unless the game is already guaranteed to have hundreds of players active and available near any given player at any given time of day, and evenly distributed redundant always-up serve…

For major games like PUBG and Fortnite this shouldn't be a problem at all. It might mean that it takes 60 seconds of matchmaking to join a new game instead of 6 seconds.

What you get in exchange is a stable and predictable competitive game. I, and many others, experienced endless frustration in PUBG due to players warping around corners and shots that were clear hits missing due to CSP. And I'm not one to complain about this kind of thing unnecessarily. It really sucked.

The PUBG people didn't even geolock their servers at all last time I played, so you could be playing with people with 300ms+ ping which is just miserable.

For less successful games maybe you have to increase the maximum ping from 40-60ms to 80-100ms or something but it should be kept as low as possible. The more players per city, the lower you can make the maximum ping.

I realize that this might make it more difficult for people in Australia (or whereever) to find a game but it seems even more wrong to make the experience bad for everyone all the time. And at least when they do find a game it will be a great experience instead of terrible.

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

#155

Post by soulofmischief » Wed, May 15, 2019, 6:32 PM UTC

Crinus wrote: post #96

soulofmischief wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a good browser extension for archiving pages in one click? Firefox.

I do not know about submitting to archive.org, but i use Save Page WE for Firefox to make full local copies of sites (it essentially takes the current DOM state and inlines all external files/dependencies to a single HTML file and then prompts you to save that file which can be opened later): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/save-page-we/

Thanks for the suggestion. You might be interested in Zotero [0] for a more general solution. It supports saving to HTML, saving to PDF, etc. and allows you to organize everything with tags.

[0] https://www.zotero.org/

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

#156

Post by Alupis » Wed, May 15, 2019, 6:37 PM UTC

staunch wrote: post #146

Alupis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you could elaborate on this? CSP is still relevant as far as I can tell. Yes, connections in a lot of countries are now on average lower latency, and yes on average CSP might not be required. However, it's not uncommon to have a couple of high latency connections on a game server (player in another country, roommate is running bit torrent, or just a poor connection). You can't always guarantee low latency, and…

Sure, this is why you have a < 60ms ping restriction or whatver. You simply don't let players play on a server with high latency because then it's a bad experience for everyone else. This is how competitive Quake Live servers worked.

That's not really a great solution, particularly for less popular games where there may not be many local servers, or servers that are not full, or servers that have at least some other players.

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

#157

Post by keerthiko » Wed, May 15, 2019, 6:52 PM UTC

staunch wrote: post #154

keerthiko wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it, many people want to play a game and there just aren't enough players in their city, games want as many players as possible to be playing them. Your requirement that games ping-restrict servers is an absolute non starter: unless the game is already guaranteed to have hundreds of players active and available near any given player at any given time of day, and evenly distributed redundant always-up serve…

For major games like PUBG and Fortnite this shouldn't be a problem at all. It might mean that it takes 60 seconds of matchmaking to join a new game instead of 6 seconds. What you get in exchange is a stable and predictable competitive game. I, and many others, experienced endless frustration in PUBG due to players warping around corners and shots that were clear hits missing due to CSP. And I'm not one to complain ab…

> It might mean that it takes 60 seconds of matchmaking to join a new game instead of 6 seconds.

Probably more like 600, even semi-popular games using server locking (like Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm) struggle to complete matchmaking in under 10 minutes for 10 players. Matchmaking is a complex and challenging problem. Constraining MM to both servers and clients that are all within 80ms of said servers, barring players with slower connections from playing the game, is a great way to ensure your game will never have PUBG/Fortnite levels of popularity.

As a game developer I'd rather people be able to play the game at all and feel playable than they all have only The Optimal Competitive Experience of Getting Headshots 100% of the time, after 10 minute queue times, or nothing at all. I would also like people who live in places where they can afford a computer, an internet connection, and my game, to play my game, and not just the continental US and EU metropolitan areas. Vietnam, Thailand, China, India are huge markets for games even with questionable internet quality.

Thankfully, most game developers and I concur on this so we all have more games to play. Maybe a compromise would be to allow players to check an option to only match with high connection quality servers/players when queuing, but so few players would check this option that one who does will have a relatively astronomical queue time to the majority who won't.

edit: for the record, I believe most such games running an actual tournament will use ping restrictions (or just run a LAN). Many also allow dedicated hosts to post servers with their own restrictions and constraints on who can join the server. I think that's a fine compromise. CSP shouldn't harm the experience if the latency of all the players is low enough that the prediction is almost instantly overwritten with server-side truth.

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

#158

Post by Nition » Wed, May 15, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

CodeArtisan wrote: post #102

Nition wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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()

Wow, there it is!

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

#159

Post by universenz » Wed, May 15, 2019, 7:07 PM UTC

nikanj wrote: post #90

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…

Not just Electron either, writing an email in Outlook frequently gives me half-a-second pauses before the typing catches up with the cursor

Ah, so the Outlook lag isn't just me. This is incredibly frustrating when typing emails. I even have that "intelligent" predictive service turned off and yet, it constantly seizes as if it is trying to work out what I'm saying in an email... Just let me type dammnit!

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

#160

Post by degenerate » Wed, May 15, 2019, 7:19 PM UTC

Thaxll wrote: post #121

Nition wrote: post #3

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this was the genesis of client-side prediction for games. If you don't know what that is, Valve has some good documentation on it (relating to Source engine, but it's the same concept).[1] Latency was still a problem even with CSP because we didn't yet have lag compensation on the server. So although you got an authoritative server (no cheating) and instant inputs (no ro…

I searched the entier HN article and everyone missed a big paper, the tribe networking model: https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/tribes-networking-model.pdf This is one of the most influential paper for multiplayer games. ( probably #1 ). Tribe was the first game to have client side prediction and rollback, this is what most games use nowdays.

Related note: you can download and play any of the classic Tribes games from https://www.tribesuniverse.com