Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Quake Engine Indicators

fabiensanglard.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 65 posts

Re: Quake Engine Indicators

#11

Post by leoc »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #3

The turtle/tortoise note is correct for UK English, but in the US (where Id software was headquartered during the development of Quake), tortoises are considered a subset of "turtles". Per Webster: > Turtle (noun): any of an order (Testudines synonym Chelonia) of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine reptiles that have a toothless horny beak and a shell of bony dermal plates usually covered with horny shields enclosing…

The naming of the ‘showturtle’ command may be a Logo reference https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/docs/html/usermanual_6.... . It’s highly likely that Carmack encountered Apple Logo on the Apple II at some point. Someone should ask him …

Re: Quake Engine Indicators

#12

Post by system2 »

Amazing, after playing all the Quake series (still playing Quake 2 daily), I learnt something new about it. I will definitely try the turtle command and try to make it appear (somehow), maybe artificially with the maxfps command. There is no way I can organically produce it on a 32-core CPU. Maybe I can try with a VM with very low specs.

Re: Quake Engine Indicators

#13

Post by system2 »

firmretention wrote: post #7

I saw that NET indicator plenty when playing on 56k back in the day. Funny to see it written about as some curious historical artifact.

You can still see it while playing in 2025, for Quake 2 at least, on Tastypleen servers in the U.S. The servers crash for some reason. Or if you connect to Chinese servers, sometimes I experience it, but rarely.

Re: Quake Engine Indicators

#14

Post by dmurray »

toast0 wrote: post #4

> The NET indicator is displayed when a client has not received any packets from the server in the last 300ms. This was likely aimed at players to help them determine how bad their ping was. This is not an indicator of high ping. It's an indication of loss of connectivity. Even if your ping is 2 seconds, the server should be sending you updates regularly. If you haven't received anything in 300 ms, either you're losi…

In practice if you have a very high ping, you're losing packets or there's buffering somewhere. Not because you have a 30,000 km long ethernet cable.

Re: Quake Engine Indicators

#15

Post by somat »

whou wrote: post #2

Cool curiosities! The chocolate quake source port is great as well. I've always wondered why there wasn't a chocolate doom equivalent for quake. It was nice to see its announcement earlier this year, so I've been quietly following its development ever since. The guy behind it did a great job, now we just need a crispy doom equivalent for quake! I also wonder where is that tortoise texture from. Seems such a small thi…

I am not familiar with chocolate doom what makes it better than any other doom source port?

There are many good source ports of quake, I always liked darkplaces but it intentionally and willfully tries to push improvements so not really for purists. There is stuff like fitzquake/quakespasm that stays much closer to vanilla quake and if you like quakeworld ftequake.

Re: Quake Engine Indicators

#16

Post by garaetjjte »

dmurray wrote: post #14
toast0 wrote: post #4

> The NET indicator is displayed when a client has not received any packets from the server in the last 300ms. This was likely aimed at players to help them determine how bad their ping was. This is not an indicator of high ping. It's an indication of loss of connectivity. Even if your ping is 2 seconds, the server should be sending you updates regularly. If you haven't received anything in 300 ms, either you're losi…

In practice if you have a very high ping, you're losing packets or there's buffering somewhere. Not because you have a 30,000 km long ethernet cable.

Unless you are playing Quake through Iridium.

Re: Quake Engine Indicators

#17

Post by hnlmorg »

jaffa2 wrote: post #8
firmretention wrote: post #7

I saw that NET indicator plenty when playing on 56k back in the day. Funny to see it written about as some curious historical artifact.

Yeah. Looks like an ethernet jack. True, buts its a modem jack (rj11 maybe?)

Are you sure it’s not meant to be an RJ45 plug? The cylindrical thing to the bottom left corner of the wall socket looks like it might be a BNC plug. Which would make sense for the era of quake when Ethernet wasn’t yet ubiquitous.

Re: Quake Engine Indicators

#18

Post by AdamH12113 »

dmurray wrote: post #14
toast0 wrote: post #4

> The NET indicator is displayed when a client has not received any packets from the server in the last 300ms. This was likely aimed at players to help them determine how bad their ping was. This is not an indicator of high ping. It's an indication of loss of connectivity. Even if your ping is 2 seconds, the server should be sending you updates regularly. If you haven't received anything in 300 ms, either you're losi…

In practice if you have a very high ping, you're losing packets or there's buffering somewhere. Not because you have a 30,000 km long ethernet cable.

When Quake(world) was released, it was common to play games on dial-up modems, where 250+ milliseconds was a normal ping time. If you played on a distant server, you could easily get over 500 milliseconds or even much worse.

Re: Quake Engine Indicators

#19

Post by toast0 »

dmurray wrote: post #14
toast0 wrote: post #4

> The NET indicator is displayed when a client has not received any packets from the server in the last 300ms. This was likely aimed at players to help them determine how bad their ping was. This is not an indicator of high ping. It's an indication of loss of connectivity. Even if your ping is 2 seconds, the server should be sending you updates regularly. If you haven't received anything in 300 ms, either you're losi…

In practice if you have a very high ping, you're losing packets or there's buffering somewhere. Not because you have a 30,000 km long ethernet cable.

Geostationary satellite internet has garbage pings too.

Re: Quake Engine Indicators

#20

Post by jaffa2 »

hnlmorg wrote: post #17
jaffa2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Looks like an ethernet jack. True, buts its a modem jack (rj11 maybe?)

Are you sure it’s not meant to be an RJ45 plug? The cylindrical thing to the bottom left corner of the wall socket looks like it might be a BNC plug. Which would make sense for the era of quake when Ethernet wasn’t yet ubiquitous.

Yes i look closer. Maybe it is a rj45.
Post reply on HN