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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)

#161

Post by FooHentai »

bni wrote: post #42
FooHentai wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>we are entering the era of cloud-based streaming game platforms, like Stadia. The latency problems of the pre-CSP 90's will be rearing their heads again. Its going to be interesting to see how these same problems will be tackled My take is that it'll be the a primary competitive point, nearly as important as the library available. Companies that can deliver the service without introducing these issues will succeed a…

There was modem dialup between two players though. Among my circle of friends in 94/95 there was someone who wanted to play DOOM every night. The games was often coordinated during the day at school, or later by phone. Also I agree that is not a given that "Cloud gaming" will take off. We have emerging VR were latency is absolutely critical, even more so than for FPS e-sports

Yeah I remember that. There were also some gaming-specific low-latency premium-rate dialup services (e.g. Wireplay in the UK) that hosted game servers on-net. With the right TCP/IP settings and Modem firmware, you could get very close to the minimum theoretical modem latencies with barely any jitter, and it made a big difference.

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

#162

Post by leonroy »

bsaul wrote: post #130
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…

my iOS phone freezes approx twice a day for 2 seconds whenever i type text. I remember playing with the keyboard buffer overflow sound when i was playing on my cpc464 (as in 64k of ram and 4Mhz cpu) in the 80s, and it took me longer than that to trigger it. "The mess we're in" famous talk by joe amstrong should be transformed into a website listing all of those absurdities, as a way to public shame the culprits.

> "The mess we're in" famous talk by joe amstrong

For anyone else: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4

Fantastic watch, thanks for recommending. Sad to hear that Joe Armstrong passed away a few weeks ago.

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

#163

Post by pedrocr »

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…

> 10-30ms is a bit optimistic, depending on how large you define a geography.

Just checked my fiber connection and it has 2ms of latency. google.com is 18ms away. I'm in Portugal and seem to be routed to a Google server 400+ km away in Spain. So my memory of playing on 10-20ms to local servers in Portugal is probably accurate. Covering the US or the EU with enough servers so everyone is never more than 30ms away seems feasible. Within easy reach of a startup with just ~50 VMs across different cloud provider locations and for popular games easy for users to setup regional servers themselves.

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

#164

Post by JetSpiegel »

animal531 wrote: post #74
Slartie wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that's a great idea! Stadia could sell it as an add-on to players which not only don't want to play their games themselves, but also aren't satisfied by watching other people play through their games on YouTube or Twitch. With this add-on, they can finally watch themselves play through their games, without having to lift a finger to, you know, actually play!

They would make a killing on Twitch, where a streamer could just buy someone else's training data and use that instead of playing themselves.

Black market dealers would swap Terabytes of hot RAM with manually inputted data from the best e-sport players in the world. Corporate enforcers would hack those dealers to delete the data.

Call it Sonic Mnemonic.

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

#165

Post by arendtio »

> In a clean sheet of paper redesign, I would try to correct more of the discrepencies

Sounds like that is what he did with Quake 3 (don't know about Quake 2). At least in Quake 3, the whole game logic is running in a so-called 'Quake Virtual Machine' file (.qvm) that is exactly the same on server and client (even cross-platform compatible). That way he doesn't just predict the client movements but the whole game world.

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

#166

Post by winrid »

theK wrote: post #68
neiman wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably would, but the creative players would suffer from it. AI never predicts creativity.

No offense but I think you underestimate the predictive potential of millions of hours of game state

Yes, and then you predict something, broadcast it to your clients, and it ends up being wrong so the clients have to roll back. Would not be a good experience.

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

#167

Post by instantwhat »

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…

From what I hear, PUBG just has poor code, so let's leave it out of the discussion and compare well-made games.

Of course, there is an upper limit on how much latency CSP and lag compensation can compensate for, and this varies by game. One game might work well up to 100ms, while another might work well up to 50ms.

> 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.

Here you're failing to account for an even more important factor: ability. Locking matches to such low relative pings would greatly restrict the number of players who were eligible to play together. That would greatly increase the skill gap between players, leading to a much worse experience.

Consider, e.g. Overwatch, which has all the Overwatch League pros on the west coast, leading to a skill gap between top players on the east and west coasts (which are usually matchmade within their own region). The more you compartmentalize players, the less likely that good players are going to be able to play with other good players, and vice versa, leading to a frustrating experience for everyone. (Not that Overwatch has good matchmaking in general. It's pretty bad, IME.)

Issues like getting hit after getting behind cover is frustrating, but it's going to happen sometimes--it's the nature of online games. But nothing is more frustrating than having teammates who aren't on the same level, or who don't have the same goals. It really makes the game feel like a complete waste of time. Matchmaking is definitely a harder and more serious problem than network latency now.

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

#169

Post by john4534243 »

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…

What is CSP ?
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