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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)

#71

Post by ndepoel »

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…

Source may have been the first engine to formally support lag compensation on the server side, but something similar was already implemented previously as a mod for Quake 3 called "Unlagged". Essentially what it did was maintain a buffer of all player positions over the last X number of milliseconds and whenever a raycast check needed to be done, it looked back in that buffer based on the current ping of the player requesting the raycast.

There is still some documentation left on the internet: https://www.ra.is/unlagged/faq.html https://openarena.fandom.com/wiki/ModCompat/Unlagged

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

#73

Post by neiman »

fsiefken wrote: post #62
neiman wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Perhaps if you train the model on the existing movement and action history of the particular player

I thought about it. But first, you need a lot of information to train a model, so it would only work for very heavy players. Second, creativity is not defined only as doing an action that others didn't do (often or never) before, but also of doing an action that you didn't do (often or never) before.

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

#74

Post by animal531 »

Slartie wrote: post #69
fsiefken wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps if you train the model on the existing movement and action history of the particular player

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.

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

#75

Post by neiman »

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

None taken. But your claim is that creativity is not possible anymore, since it was all done in the "millions of hours of game state". However, if creativity is possible, then my argument is correct.

Another issue is that machine learning/AI don't predict rare events, like earth quakes. So even with all the knowledge in the world, it won't predict a rare creative move of a player.

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

#76

Post by Insanity »

It seems like almost every time something about Carmack is posted, people point to the book "Masters of Doom", about the development of id games (Wolf3d, doom, commander keen). It's pretty interesting read imo: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/222146.Masters_of_Doom

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

#78

Post by abhink »

neiman wrote: post #75
theK wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

None taken. But your claim is that creativity is not possible anymore, since it was all done in the "millions of hours of game state". However, if creativity is possible, then my argument is correct. Another issue is that machine learning/AI don't predict rare events, like earth quakes. So even with all the knowledge in the world, it won't predict a rare creative move of a player.

But every event, creative or otherwise, is made up of hundreds of smaller events. That complicated wall jump - 360 kill you just did used several input signals. Even if the server side AI can't predict the exact final outcome, it can definitely help with the intermediate, well known states for at least some of the input systems.

I say some but I do believe a large enough volume of data can improve the performance of this class of input/states.

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

#79

Post by dvdgsng »

ndepoel wrote: post #71
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…

Source may have been the first engine to formally support lag compensation on the server side, but something similar was already implemented previously as a mod for Quake 3 called "Unlagged". Essentially what it did was maintain a buffer of all player positions over the last X number of milliseconds and whenever a raycast check needed to be done, it looked back in that buffer based on the current ping of the player r…

dm17 unlagged instagib. good times.

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

#80

Post by wink »

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…

It's funny. Sure, DSL brought the (much) bigger bandwidths, but when moving from ISDN to DSL, ping times increased again and it made total sense to play ESL matches over telephone dialup instead of DSL. But either they improved or it's just the normal. Anyway, I stopped playing shooters in the early 00s and so I don't really care anymore.

source: German who never had a 56k modem but started with ISDN in 1998 and can't really remember a ping > 100 on EU servers ;)

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