How Fast Too Slow? A Study Of Quake Pings 145
Jonathan Lennox writes: "Grenville Armitage has published an analysis of ping times of clients connecting to his Quake III Arena server. His conclusion is that 150 milliseconds is the limit that people find tolerable, and says this may have interesting implications for Internet Quality of Service research."
Network latency considerations in new games (Score:1)
So, new games are definitely going to take into consideration lag times by concentrating onto things like the client and how efficient it is regarding the transmition and reception of IP traffic, how the servers work (Think Battlenet for a moment), and how to make the overall online gaming experience better than it has been in the past.
This new RPS game goes beta in about two weeks. I have work to do!
150? 100 is what most people need... (Score:3)
Interesting... (Score:3)
NEED sub-25! (Re: 150?) (Score:2)
As far as the infrastructure goes, Maui supercomputing center is on the order of that 25.0, too, so sub-150 ping times are definitely quite reachable, if the right hardware is thrown at it. 150 ms is a tenth of the way to the Moon!
Re:Q1 - strategy, Q3 - ping (Score:1)
Playing Q1 with 250ms ping (and very little pl) was almost smooth. In fact, I was always a top ranked player on TF servers, wherever I played. 250 is about the lowest you can get on a 56k modem. You'd certainly notice the difference at lower ping levels, the game is almost crisp and solid at 100 and below.
Never played Q2, I thought it sucked for multiplayer, and I liked TF better anyways (until Q1 got opensourced).
Now with Q3 anything over 90 really is useless. It's playable, but just not fun, it's not what I paid $75 CDN for. Less than 15, almost like a local network game, under 50 is ideal, you're getting into grey territory after that. Also, server ping and actual player ping seem to differ a lot in Q3. In GameSpy I'll find a 50-80ms server, and it's 150 once I'm playing (just press Tab to see the scores list). I don't know where the optimized network code went into (maybe optimized from Q2, I heard some pretty bad stories about network performance there).
Really, with Q3 the gameplay is just not enjoyable at 100+, there are very good players in that category, but if you just play the occasional game you'll find even 100ms pretty frustrating if you're up against 50ms players.
Lights affect on latency (Score:1)
Bow to LAG ZEN!!! (Score:2)
This led me to believe that there's a zone you can get into if you play log enough, like a blindfolded ninja, where you're kicking ass regardless of your handicap.
It's all about knowing where your opponent will be.
I've got cable now, so I'm sucking barrel a lot more than I used to. Maybe I should go back to dial-up...
Re:Interesting... (Score:1)
Re:Interesting... (Score:2)
The main reason for using 32 bit color is for multi pass rendering. The eye can't see the 32 bits of color. BUT when you do several transforms on a 32 bit image, (Such as blends, color mixes, etc) there is always errors that are being inroduced into the image. After several passes of such operations using 16 bit color the image quality is severly impacted.
At 32 bit color depth the impact is signifigantly smaller. ( A lot of people like John Carmack are urging for even HIGHER color depths so that the image errors are reduced even more so ).
As far as framerate:
Most framerates mentioned are PEAK rates. You might get 210 FPS when staring at a wall (and thus most geometry has been remved by the game engine) but in a fire fight that frame rate may drop to 30 fps.
A lot of people say that 30 is enough.. but frankly I can "feel" the flicker in flourescent lights ( That operate at 60Hz ) The higher the fps the smoother the game feels. And even though you may not be able to emperically measure the differance between 100 to 120 fps for some reasonj it just "feels" better.
Not overstated... (Score:2)
This is no different.
Interactivity is all about latency- and 200 msec is 1/5 of a second to put things in perspective. Try typing something with that sort of latency sometime- you'll find it unpleasant if you touch type.
Ping IS a QoS issue... (Score:3)
There's More To It Than Just Ping (Score:3)
Not being a Q3A player (I won't buy a copy until they remove the copy control measures), I can't speak directly to Q3A latency in general or his server in particular. However, having been a QuakeWorld addict for several years now, I have several opinions on what contributes to overall quality of game play.
First off, let me repeat as others have above that being an LPB (Low-Ping Bastard) does not assure you victory against all comers. I have been well and truly thorked by players sporting 200+ pings. I am also a decisively mediocre player.
While round-trip time to the server ("ping") is important, I find the game's rate to be just as important. rate is the amount of bandwidth your client will consume, and defaults to 2500 (bytes per second) for QuakeWorld. This limits how much game state can be updated at any given time. Lower rates mean less game state data and reduced "fluidity" of game play. So even if your ping is <20ms, a rate of 2500 gives you incredibly choppy updates. Thus, if you have a high-bandwidth connection (DSL, cable modem, OC3), the first thing you should do is crank your rate. I keep mine set at 8000, which gives me much smoother, much more fluid display. I could set my rate to 10000 since I have high-bandwidth SDSL, but I keep it down a bit as a courtesy to server operators so as not take more bandwidth from the server than I need.
Your rate setting should not exceed the total bandwidth available on your net connection. Thus, setting your rate to 6000 on a 56k modem will actually make things worse. Games with the rate setting include Quake, QuakeWorld, Quake2, Quake-3 Arena, HalfLife, CounterStrike, and all other Quake engine-derived games. Non-Quake engine-derived games also have this kind of setting, but they all call it something else.
Another big source of latency can be your ISP and their Quality Of Service metric. I used to have 416K SDSL through Best/Verio before Northpoint cratered. I have since switched to Speakeasy 1.1M SDSL, who partners with Covad. With Best/Verio, the best pings I saw were in the 20-25 ms range. Occasionally I would get an 18. When I switched to Speakeasy, I naturally assumed that the higher bandwidth would yield even lower pings. However, this has not happened. After some study with traceroute, it's my suspicion that Speakeasy's routers are either overloaded or configured sub-optimally. I posted my thumbnail analysis to Speakeasy's discussion fora [kontent.net] (mine's the last post in the thread), but haven't received any response yet.
Another way the network can hose your gameplay is by dropping packets. Speakeasy seems a little more willing to drop the odd packet than was Best/Verio. However, Best/Verio had a router in their network that would occasionally go apesh*t and drop all packets for about 90 seconds, which is long enough to get you disconnected from any server.
Games seem particularly vulnerable to dropped packets. QuakeWorld is the only game that seems to handle this issue robustly, patiently waiting to re-sync with the server. Nearly every other network game I've played -- Quake2, Unreal Tournament, HalfLife -- will never re-synchronize, and you have to reconnect. Serious Sam is especially bad in this regard (I'm willing to cut Croteam some slack since this is their first product, but I hope they fix it soon).
BTW, most of the Quake engine-based games have a little network diagnostic tool called netgraph, which shows you a realtime scrolling graph of your network latency, including dropped packets, corrupted packets, and overflow packets. When the game play starts to suck, you can pop this up and get an idea of what the cause is.
Finally, if there are any FPS gods in the SF Bay Area who would like to help me graduate from frustratingly mediocre player to good-enough-not-to-embarrass-myself player, I'd appreciate hearing from you.
Schwab
Re:Finally! (Score:2)
I don't believe that ping should be the sole basis of your designation. I may have a *somewhat* steady 95 ping, but it suddenly will jump to 1500 in a single ping, 500 at the next, and 90 at the next.. Now. When I am playing this icons me and I am toast (especially when fighting). The ping never shows this, but you can see it...
When I was a 56k HPB at 185 ping I had a better connection for Quake than I do w/my 768/128k DSL from Verizon.
150 is not tolerable. I would say that 125 would be closer to HPB/LPB IMHO.
150 is very HIGH (Score:1)
A 150 ping in Tribes2 IS UNPLAYABLE, though it is do-able in UT or Q3. I would strafe around your butt and shoot you in the back before you knew what was happening
As a dedicated LAN hound, ONLINE GAMING SUCKS....
Re:Implications for what? (Score:2)
I don't think that's quite the case. Both sides estimate the RTT (Round Trip Time) on the link, and then adjust the window according to the RTT. The problem you describe comes into play on much higher bandwidth connections with much higher latencies. This page [nih.gov] describes the problem reasonably well, although it appears to be a little dated.
By default, TCP offers a maximum window of 64K bytes (which is 512K bits). At 4Mbit/sec, this takes 125ms worth of time to transmit. So, basically, if your RTT is about 125ms or less, you should see 4Mbit/sec transfers. For TCP's maximum window size to limit you to 30KB/sec, your RTT would need to be ~17000ms. I think it's much more likely that your network card's driver is hosed so thqt you're losing ACKs and having to wait for TCP to retransmit.
So what sort of latency are you seeing to kernel.org? I'm seeing 90-100ms. I doubt you're seeing 17000ms.
--Joe--
Re:Interesting... (Score:1)
TV and film look good because the images are naturally blended into each other so this mimics the persistence of vision that occurs when we naturally see things (i.e. your brain may only pull the image x times per second, but that image is a composite of all that was seen in that period of time). If you have a home video camera you'll find that most of them have an "action" setting that switches from this blurred image collection to a static sequential frame type, and you'll find that it looks quite nasty as far as being "realistic". It looks like those old movies where it was very flashy.
Indeed 3dfx (before they died) built the capability to render many scenes into one into their chipset. The idea was that even if it was 60fps, each of those 60fps would have the natural pOV and would "look" much smoother.
There was a whole debate some time back where people were arguing over the limits of what the human eye could see and there were some pretty ridiculous statements. For example some people were claiming that absolutely, positively people could not see over 30 fps (for instance), yet I can tell you my anecdotal evidence that I can absolutely see the difference between Q3 at 60fps, and 100fps, and 120fps. Each increase (with the static Q3 slideshow which is what computers present) feels smoother.
Re:Interesting... (Score:2)
Re:Quakedot.org (Score:1)
Don't get me wrong, I like the game - but I'd rather play it than read about it continually.
Quakedot.org (Score:3)
Re:Ping Times and Suckage (Score:2)
However, here's the thing I despise. I HATE HATE HATE when someone says "You're only good because of your ping," which basically means that if you're an LPB and you're winning, you must suck, and you're just winning because of your connection. It's just not true - I've had my ass whupped by plenty of modem users, and I've schooled many of my fellow LPB's.
It doesn't matter if you're a pro or if you're just some kid with a cable modem - I don't care how good or bad you are, as long as you don't say stupid shit like that.
--
Re:Q1 - strategy, Q3 - ping (Score:1)
Uhm, how is he supposed to circumvent this? He can't make the ip-packets go faster by magic you know
If the packet takes 150 ms to leave your computer, go through your connection and get to the recieving host, how are you going to reduce that time?
The only thing he could do is to reduce the packet size, but bandwith has never been a problem in these games.
The lag will always be there, no matter what (unless it's hardware-caused lag, like diablo2) and the only thing the game can do is make it _seem_ smoother.
Even though the older quake games were much less dependant on pure aiming (lpb) skills, given 2 players in q1 with the same skills, the lpb would still win. I've met plenty of people that i spanked on lan's that I lost bigtime to in q1 and q2 because i was a hpw
@home (Score:1)
Re:Implications for what? (Score:5)
As if that requires any real bandwidth or requires low latency/packet loss/jitter.
99% of the Internet is porn and games. Porn doesn't require low latency, low jitter or low packet loss, and can be safely QoS'ed into the "available bandwith" slot along with Mr. CEO's VITALLY IMPORTANT email to his golfing pals.
The only thing left is games and VoIP.
The latter is strictly CBR.
This leaves GAMES.
Nobody wants to admit this. It is the Internet's dirty little secret that when a company complains to an ISP about its shitty latency and packet loss rates, it is NOT because Mr. PHB can't check his stock portfolio (after all, he can do this over a modem with 20%+ packet loss and a ping of 500 ms). It is because somebody in the IT staff just got fragged by an LPB.
Re:Gradients, not total colors (Score:1)
See, I wasn't trying to be insightful really, I just was curious. All these things I had been pondering before, but it's very hard to do a web search on "color depth" or "frame rates" and get useful results unless you also know to add "alpha" and "mach banding" to those.
Thanks much!
-gleam
Re:Interesting... (Score:2)
The human eye can only recognize a color depth of X, where X is less than current standard "true-color" depths. Yet we still have 32 bit color. Why? Is it because of palettes? does having 16.7 million colors make our blues bluer, our reds redder? We can't individually recognize all 16.7 million colors, but if we're looking at a digital image of a lake, will having our color depth set to 32bpp instead of 24 make a difference, if the image is properly created?
So then there's the question, does the same apply to framerates? Sure, we can't see all the frame rates out there, but does having more to choose from make a difference?
That is, if you have 20 frames of your character at the edge of a cliff, versus only 7 frames (70 vs 200fps) are you more likely to better handle the cliff?
I've heard people claim that "high frame rates make strafe jumping easier" (understand that I'm a quake 2 guy). I don't know if there's any truth to that, but it may be an explanation.
So the question is, even though you can only see one third of those 210 frames per second, does that make your playing more enjoyable or better? Similarly, does looking at a 48bpp image make you happier than looking at a 24bpp image, even though you can't see more than 21bpp (or whatever the figure is)?
Just some stuff to ponder...
-gleam
Pings never did measure speed. (Score:2)
Ping times and throughput are related, but not directly.
Also, your speed of light theory is not quite correct. The primary source of latency is buffering through network devices (routers, switches, etc). The transmission delay is a secondary source.
Haptics research ... (Score:2)
Quake is just another domain whether eye-hand coordination is important enough that any perceptual delay seriously screws up our processing unit. Research in graphics, especially VR, indicate that 0.1 delay is esseential for interactivity. Quake as a wanna-be VR experience is starting to hit these issues.
I predict a new wave of jargon including
- Quake-second (fraction of second delay to get fragged)
- Java-minute (amount of compilation needed to fetch/drink can of coke)
- Cray-hour (amount of CPU needed to solve a problem over a lunch break)
LL
Quake and ping times (Score:1)
I've played mostly Quake1/QuakeWorld and Quake3Arena, so this might not be applicable to other games, it certainly isn't to games in other genres, like StarCraft/BroodWar etc.
My experience is that people's view of lag/ping times is much the same as with fps (and pretty much anything, i suppose) It all depends on what they're used too, back when Quake first came out, we were all quite happy playing it with 20fps/keyboard/high ping. Then - as we got better computers/mice/connections - we got more and more fastidious. After we had played on LANs we were no longer content with our modem connections, when we got faster computers, going back to playing on slower ones (like in school) was no longer as fun.
Of course - as with anything - sooner or later you get to a point where you're satisfied, better ping/fps doesn't make much difference any longer, and this is what's interesting, we don't want the lowest that's acceptable, we want it good enough so we don't have to go around wishing we had better connections/fps/whatever...
The magical point when you get content - however it may vary from person to person - seems to be around 70 fps and 20 ping. I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me here - I probably would have a few years ago - but most of those haven't tried playing with those conditions, and playing with 25 ping as opposed to 50 really is a big advantage
I had some other really clever points thought out, but I'm too tired to remember them. (which might also be the cause of my somewhat incoherent rambling =)
If You want to flame me, discuss ping times/the qw scene or whatever, feel free to reply/mail me/contact on irc(#qh on quakenet(irc.quakenet.eu.org)) I'm almost allways online...
Too tired to leave some witty closing line, gonna sleep now, later...
Re:Interesting... (Score:2)
You can test this pretty easily for yourself. Get a game that can code-restrict framerate, but that is old enough to run really fast on a modern video card. Run it and a good monitor at various refresh rates. Try comparing (game/monitor) at 75/75 to 75/150 to 150/150 fps. Most people can easily tell the difference between 75/150 and 150/150. Try 120/150 and 150/150. Again, most people you'll ask will be able to see the difference, and identify which is smoother.
Re:Interesting... (Score:2)
Re:Ping isn't a QoS issue (Score:1)
For a longer distance connection, of course, things change.
-misao
Re:Oh man (Score:1)
Re:Poisson-ish looking data (Score:1)
The poisson is used to model events, such as the number of calls at a business, etc.
Re:Ping Times and Suckage (Score:1)
Maxiumn people will accept or better exists? (Score:1)
Re:Wrong conclusion!!! - How to get the right one. (Score:2)
i) Packet loss
ii) Ping as reported by the client (while holding the actual packet delay constant)
iii) Actual packet delay (while holding the ping reported by the client constant)
The second and third options may not be possible - it involves delaying specific packets and not others.
Also, to get a good feel you should also be measuring the performance of the players (ie does a low ping actually correlate with the number of frags), and by selectively delaying certain players you should be able to remove the skew given by the fact that better players will be willing to pay for a better connection.
Further studies could involve examining correlation between the length of time people spend on your server compared to their ping and packet loss (again selectively varied to avoid the skew mentioned above).
Many of these studies would have to be very carefully done to avoid any external factors. For example, showing that better players have low ping times doesn't mean that a low ping helps you play - it may just mean that the better players have DSL because they spend a lot of time on the net, while casual players are more likely to have a modem.
Getting accurate stats and results is a difficult subject - far more difficult than presented in the original report, which does nothing more than profile the internet connections of the players on his Quake server.
Wrong conclusion!!! (Score:5)
Let's think about this a little more:
i) He's on a T1 and possibly advertises the fact.
ii) Serious MP Quake players will have a fast connection (DSL/Cable) and not a modem.
iii) Quake players will *choose* the lowest ping because it seems like a good idea - they won't reject a server over 150ms, just prefer one below it.
Looking at the results, the best he can say is that most people that play on his server are from the US, which for the most part keeps their ping under 150ms. You can't draw any assumptions about what people "prefer" from that data.
Re:Ping isn't a QoS issue (Score:1)
For the past 5 years networks have been fast enough that the largest contributor to round-trip times is simply the speed of light"
At 2/3 the speed of light (200 000 KM/sec)
it takes 53 mSec for the 10,500KM round trip between MIT and London.
My cable modem has a ping of 40 mSec to UK sites
and 140 mSec to MIT.
My line is empty.
Guess MITs line has been congested for the last five years!
Comparison to interactive voice (Score:1)
For person to person phone calls, when designing Voice over IP network the one-way delay budget is 150ms. Beyond that participants begin to speak over each other, like you would experience when speaker to some that is on the other end of call that is routed over a satellite.
- Dustin -
Quake v Unreal (Score:1)
overstated conclusions (Score:5)
I fail to see how this indicates some kind of acceptable limit. A similar study done 2 years ago might have reached exactly the same kind of conclusion for 200 msec. Within a year, it might yield 100 msec.
All this tells us is that most players succeed at getting 150msec pings if they can. It doesn't tell us whether they find this number satisfying. If they were unable to play at 150, they might very well be happy playing at 200 or 250.
So this doesn't tell a potential service provider anything beyond the current status of the internet's average ping times. And such data will be useless in a year.
What would demonstrate his point would be players who didn't know what their ping was, and were able to switch between servers with known pings in a controlled situation (50/100/150/200... for example). One could then watch where the players end up, if you saw no difference between the 50 and 100 ping servers, you could *then* conclude that players were satisfied with 100 and saw no need to try to get to 50.
Re:Interesting... (Score:2)
---
Re:New excuse for the lame (Score:1)
Quakeworld was very playable with a ping between a 100ms and 150ms as long as the ping times were stable. The prediction algorithms did their work pretty good, but having a ping 100ms higher than an opponent of approximately the same level equaled certain death.
Johan V. (who has finally overcome his quakeworld addiction)
Re:@home (Score:1)
Johan V.
The framerate argument is already settled!!!! (Score:1)
The problem is that when you see a frame, the stuff you see is old information, at 32 frames per second, it has a delay of at least 31ms, at 72 frames per second at least 10ms. The difference is 21 ms. So someone playing at 100 frames with a ping of 80ms sees things earlier than someone playing at 32 frames per second and a ping of 100ms, strange at first sight, but very much true.
20ms difference doesn't seem much, but when two equal (decent) players play against each other, it does, especially when they both have very low (equal) pings!
And hereby I conclude my lessons in latency,
Johan V.
Re:Oh man (Score:1)
JUST DON'T BEAT THOSE LPB'S IN DIRECT COMBAT, those kind of thing really pisses them off (at least it pisses me off).
Johan V.
Re: (Score:1)
When I started playing Q1 and Quakeworld, there weren't too many people using a fast permanent connection. Permanent connection and fast connection were two thing that went hand in hand. A fast connection ment you had an advantage over the player using a slow connection.
But it wasn't all about pings, it had to do with the permanent prt as well. Someone with a permamant connection tends to play a lot more then someone who has to pay $1 for every hour he plays.
People who played a LOT were the first ones to get a cable connection, just because it SAVED a lot of money (I know I saved quite a bit
Johan V.
Re:Packet Loss is far worse than High Ping (Score:1)
Johan V.
Re: Trip around the world (Score:1)
Johan V.
Re: have you thought of the cheating possibilities (Score:1)
Johan V.
Re:Quake v Unreal (Score:1)
Johan V.
Re: What, you're just kidding? (Score:1)
The ones who pay $50 for their fast connections, deserve an advantage.
So I say it loud and proud:
"Screw you high ping jerks and your wussy slow internet connections."
;-)
Johan V.
Re:Conditioning, and reflexes. (Score:2)
You're absolutely right. A better experiment would involve manipulating [slashdot.org] ping times or other network factors (while managing to keep players blind to their experimental condition) and measuring things like satisfaction, score, etc.
Interestingly, even if you can't tell that you've got a bad connection you may show physiological signs of stress. Check out this cool paper [ucl.ac.uk] which looks at the effects of frame rate (in video conferencing) on physiological symptoms such as heart rate and palm sweat. Even when people didn't know that the frame rate was reduced, they showed signs of stress.
That being said, I think this was a cool use of available data, with implications about judgments and preferences rather than about performance.
Packet Loss is far worse than High Ping (Score:4)
Of course, games whose prediction engines are notably worse (*ahem*UnrealTournament*ahem*) will suffer both from packet loss and high ping.
-Ted
75ms is my cutoff (Score:2)
Here is what I found when I used to play Quake 1.
< 15 ms = smooth as glass!
< 75 ms = good
< 150 ms = tolerable
> 150 ms = forgot it
Mach banding example here (Score:3)
You're welcome
> All these things I had been pondering before, but it's very hard to do a web search on "color depth" or "frame rates" and get useful results
Aye, you won't find the answers unless you knew what you were looking for, but if you knew what you were looking for, you wouldn't need to look. Or something like that
You can see an example of "Mach Banding" here
http://graphics.lcs.mit.edu/classes/6.837/F00/Lec
This page shows how our eye percieves Mach Banding
http://www.loria.fr/~holzschu/cours/HTML/ICG/Reso
And this applet lets you try it out:
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram/ArtAndVision/MachBandi
Cheers
Gradients, not total colors (Score:5)
Short anwer:
Where's the COLOR faq when you need it?
Seriously,
Gamma ties into this, which I'll ignore, since it a different problem, but the short answer is: you want as many colors as possible when you need to interpolate between any given 2. e.g. a high gradient.
At 32 bit color, with 8 bits per channel (e.g. 3 channels = red, green, blue) that gives us 256 levels for primary gradients. (Less for non-primary colors.)
32 bit is still too low, though. Ideally we should have 16-bit per channel (i.e. 48 bit color) since our eye is more sensitive to greens, and 256 shades isn't quite enough.
So it's not about TOTAL colors, but about the NUMBER of color steps BETWEEN colors.
Blending, or "overlaying" transparent textures is another reason high bit depths matter. If you overlay 8 transparent objects in 16-bit color, you get [bad] artifacts. You can see this on the older Voodoo cards, when you had transparent smoke.
And finally, memory access if MUCH faster if memory is aligned on a power of 2. 24 is not a power of 2, while 32 is. Memory controllers are slower if they have to access memory on odd alignment. There was a paper few years ago paper showing you a "wierd" memory touching walk where instead of doing
for (int i = 0; i < 100000; i++ )
block[i] = c;
it would be faster to do
block[i+0] = c;
block[i+2] = c;
block[i+1] = c;
block[i+3] = c;
> will having our color depth set to 32bpp instead of 24 make a difference,
Aside from the major speed difference, visually no, because the last 8 bits in 32bit color are usually used for alpha (the level of opacity)
> So the question is, even though you can only see one third of those 210 frames per second, does that make your playing more enjoyable or better?
It's an expontential curve of decreasing returns.
i.e. double the frame rate from 10 to 20, is MUCH more noticable then the double jump from 30 to 60.
But there are a few reasons you want > 100 hz frame rates.
a) The more people that are on screen, the lower the frame-rate. You want a high frame rate so when the action gets "thick and heavy" your frame rate still is above 60.
b) I find a monitor with 100 hz to be rock solid and easy on the eyes. At lower frequence (like 60) Hz I get a head ache (probably because the way our body clock is tied to 60 hz)
> Similarly, does looking at a 48bpp image make you happier than looking at a 24bpp image,
You get less "Mach banding" with a higher bit depth.
Again, this is another example expontential curve of decreasing returns. 48 bpp is "very good". 24 bpp is "good enough"
Hope this helps.
Re:Q1 - strategy, Q3 - ping (Score:1)
Of course. The difference between Q1 and Q3 is that a good HPB (150-300) usually beat an average LPB (50-150) in Q1, whereas in Q3 fighting up just 50 ms is like having a lead weight tied to your railgun. Railing someone whose ping is 150 less than yours in Q3 is like trying to swat a flying mosquito with a broadsword.
Q1 - strategy, Q3 - ping (Score:2)
In Q1 matador I found that 250 was pretty playable as long as the local lpb's didn't have quad lightning + res rune. I was consistently ranked in the top ten Q1 matador players at the CLQ [theclq.com], on a 56k; I didn't get much better when I moved to a cable modem, except that now people called me an LPB bot instead of just a bot. No one bothered to consider the idea that strategy might be more important than ping.
PL was the real killer; a 75 ping with a 15% pl was worse than a 250/0 pl. In Q1.
In Q3 I can't play with a ping over 90; i get hit with rockets and then hear them fire, or I'll get hit with a rail shot and then see the doors I was hiding behind open. Not to mention the fact that people with low pings move 50% faster and strafe (or jump) circles around 100 ping "hpb's" in Q3.
Sigh... I guess it doesn't matter, in the grand scheme of things, but I sure miss the old Q1 days.
Oh man (Score:1)
I've seen 200+ pingers destroy LPBs, due to their skill at anticipation. Give these HPBs a low ping, and they suck 'cause their gameplay is all out of balance.
An interesting fact (Score:2)
And, of course, the idea of actually waiting until you hear from your arm "I'm in the right position" to send the "release now" command is just way too slow. Like hundreds of milliseconds.
I think there's something here about us being able to cope with a wide variety of delays, so long as they are consistent. Designing a game? It may be worth slowing down the average response time to half, if it reduces the variability of the response time.
In fact, that applies to designing pretty much anything.
Re:Quakedot.org (Score:1)
I've had a much more enjoyable
One other thing, why in god's green earth was the above post given a score of 3 (at the time I post this). It should be a one, or maybe a two at most.
Quakedot.org(Score:1, Whining)
Re:Score v. Ping (Score:1)
I played a game earlier of UT & won 30/20 compared to 17/15 (85ms ping), 15/12 (65ms ping), 10/11 (130ms ping), & 1 bot... In CS I've laid the smack on some LPB's (3 sub 20ms players) so bad they complained (constantly) I was cheating...
It can be done, but it takes skill not a better net conenction to be good... If I had a l33t low latency internet conenction I'd be one scarry individual to run into on any of these FPS games...
Re:WOW!!! (Score:1)
But instead we don't have ISDN, we don't have xDSL, heck I can't buy a T1 from them here!, & cable? hahaha... cable companies don't even want us to talk to them (they setup shop as far away from their customer base as they can here), so cable modems are out...
Re:WOW!!! (Score:1)
Re:Quakedot.org (Score:1)
150 sounds about right for Half-Life, for example, which is what I mostly play these days.
This article is inteesting because it questions whether ISPs are aware that this is the level of latency FPS players will accept to their servers.
Re:New excuse for the lame (Score:1)
Eating half a pound of prunes every morning is pretty much guaranteed to make you loose at all times. To make sure, you could also eat a quarter pound of Ex-lax.
Mass Debate [mass-debate.net]
Re:Interesting... (Score:1)
New excuse for the lame (Score:1)
Ping latency may make you loose some times but not all times.
Re:150 is very HIGH (Score:1)
Re:Interesting... (Score:1)
Finally! (Score:5)
Now we can properly categorize people regardless of their ISP or method of connecting to the Internet. We have a number. If you are less than 150, you're an LPB. Otherwise, you're just a p1ngk1dd13.
It's kinda like penis length, really. It doesn't matter at all in the grand scheme of things, but it's nice to have a number to compare yourself to.
You dont play quake do you? (Score:1)
Now I have a cable modem and my ping times are significantly less. I can get ping times as low as 45, but usually end up playing at 60-100. My game is much better now and I usually end up in the top 3. Does a low ping guarentee 31337 skillz? nope, Ive schooled 100pings when playing at 200, but its damn hard. Having a low ping is definately an advatage. Most net users are limited to dialup so the best they can get is 150. But really the lowest ping is the best if you want to rack up the killz.
Ping isn't a QoS issue (Score:3)
High ping times making games unplayable mean that north americans will never enjoy playing against australians, but it really has very little to do with the quality or cost of their network connections.
Strange article. (Score:2)
Re:Implications for what? (Score:4)
Not always the case. I've switched ISPs twice as a result of high latency. My beef is that using remote editors through Telnet and SSH is virtually impossible when it takes a second or more for each keystroke to show up on the screen.
Now did I type seven backspaces or eight? The cursor has stopped moving; is that all, or are there more cursor commands in the pipe?
--
The more things change, the more they don't... (Score:1)
150! no way I'm playing with that (Score:1)
Conditioning, and reflexes. (Score:5)
If you play at a lan party all weekend, and go home to your 80 ping, you swear you're playing in mud. Your rails are off, everything feels Wonky. And yet you may, if you're like me, remember a time where you were Completely comfortable living inside of a 250 ping. 'Getting inside of your lag' we'd say. And after 6 or 8 hours playing quake at 250 ping, eveything in real life seemed a little off, like it would be ok if you could adjust the latency a little
The other thing is, some people are just slower than others. If you're kinda slow, then you might not notice the difference between 150 and 200ms, simply becasue your body doesn't work like that. On the other hand, i know some squirril-people that may be able to detect network latency differences within a few ms no problem.
So i dunno. I guess the article is talking about a law of averages, but i think there is a lot more to consider.
Respond by rendering slow frames in low res (Score:2)
If your card is rendering 200fps you may never see most of the frames, but the important thing is that none of the slow frames takes more than 1/60th of a second to render.
I agree with this post. But another technique is that if you know you have a high-poly or a high-overdraw scene to render, you can render it at a lower quality (drop from 1280 to 640 pixels across, or turn off full-scene anti-aliasing, or decrease light map res or mip-map bias, or do several other tricks). The eye can't see as much detail in a quickly moving scene as it can in a still scene.
No wonder I can't win! (Score:2)
~$ ping -i 450 10.0.3.1
PING 10.0.3.1 (10.0.3.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=6165731.1 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=255 time=3211900.8 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=5124922.8 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=6388671.9 ms
Re:Q1 - strategy, Q3 - ping (other comments) (Score:2)
And yes, you are correct: qw==strategy q3==ping/aim. Again, check out Promode for an entirely different way of playing q3.
-Elendale
Re:Packet Loss (Score:2)
Re:Gradients, not total colors (Score:2)
Have you ever been to a CPL event? Or even to a "l33T" gamers house?? Everyone I know, myself included, even tho I'm not at the level of the top 100 players anymore (I used to be.. but I can't play 6+ hours a day anymore =), plays at the WORST resolution possible. The Quake3 of the good players looks infinitely worse than software quake1.
Fire up Q3, set everything to 16 bit color, turn OFF every graphic option there is, go to vertex lighting, then add 'r_picmip 5' to you config before you play.
That is what 99.999% of the "good" players play at. Who cares about 32 bit =) heck, if there was an 8 bit option, we'd all use that... more frames per second is good.
Nobody who plays Q3 competatively on-line ever sees anything remotely like 24 bit or higher... sure it looks good, but until high end gamers have rendering farms in the basement to do each frame quick, no "hardcore" gamer cares.Re:Interesting... (Score:2)
I put it down to the fact I don't own a TV, and rarely use a screen with a refresh less than 85Hz. I suspect that you have to train your eyes / brain not to see the flicker in a TV, but for most of us this was done before we were aware that the flickered so we've never really been aware of it.
[1] Except on my friends 100Hz TV which is fine.
Re:Ping IS a QoS issue... (Score:2)
Re:Ping Times and Suckage (Score:2)
I think what you're TRYING to say, in your strange, 1337 way, is that a study comparing latency to game-success (i.e., score, frags, etc.) would be interesting.
I have to agree, it WOULD be interesting to see what sorts of correlations pop up. I have suspicions that you are correct when you state that the amount of "suckage" on online games has gone up. Think about it - the early online games required 1.)awareness of the Internet 2.)an Internet connection 3.)some technical skill or interest to adopt the game itself. In other words, persons with more gaming experience (computer geeks) tended to play more, thus, you had a higher percentage of better players in your game. Of course, with the current proliferation of higher-bandwidth Internet connections, plus the overall increase in gaming accessibility, you have more non-proficient players (suckage).
Of course, this doesn't really account for me. I've been a gamer since the 70's, have enormous amounts of bandwidth (software developer...I get to write it off...nyah nyah), and I still suck ass on Tribes 2.
Re:Gradients, not total colors (Score:3)
Except in Quake, where all 32bits are reserved for Brown.
How fast too slow? (Score:2)
all your fast are belong to us.
I don't think it's ALL ping... (Score:2)
As an example, take the original Tribes. I used to play that game on 56k with a ping of 500-800 and I never even felt it. Conversly, now on cable, I get pings of 50-150 in Quake 3 and UT, and it still sucks pretty badly. Tribes works fine, as always, and Tribes 2 does as well.
For the modem performance, consider that I live in one of the worst parts of the US for modem access - New Mexico. Minimum pings of 300ms outside of games, numerous hops just to get to the hub 1000 miles away in San Francisco, max downloads of 2.2k/sec etc. and you'll see I'm a good candidate for telling you how bad modem can really be.
Yes, ping and packet loss have a noticeable effect on gameplay, obviously. However, I think the truly good games are the ones that can cope with it, and not make you feel like you wasted $50 simply because you can't afford a T1 like the game developers have.
Re:Ping isn't a QoS issue (Score:5)
Oh, you mean like the Internet?
\/\/
100-200ms (Score:4)
Jacobson, V. 1990a. "Compressing TCP/IP Headers for Low-Speed Serial Links," RFC 1144, 43 Pages (Feb.). Describes CSLIP, a version of SLIP with the TCP and IP headers compressed.
WOW!!! (Score:2)
*rambles on for a while while riding backwards on a horse...*
Re:Interesting... (Score:4)
However, he was talking about pre-rendered animations. So each frame was displayed 1/60th of a second apart. In a game each frame takes a different length of time to render, and if any frame takes more than 1/60th of a second to render then you can see a slight blip.
If your card is rendering 200fps you may never see most of the frames, but the important thing is that none of the slow frames takes more than 1/60th of a second to render.
yes it is (Score:2)
games need sub 150, but to be competitive you need to be with in say 50-75 as the people your playing against.
bandwith and packet loss are anotehr issue, but yet another is the fact some networks basicaly through away UDP packets. . . .
games that sinc everyone up 200-150 is ok, games where ping matters, >100. And the leet players sub 20's.
Re:yes it is (Score:2)
Ping, latency and skill... (Score:2)
So what? (Score:4)
Ping Times and Suckage (Score:4)
"I'm on a T1, guys," the LBP would say and would -- under most circumstances -- dominate the game. There were (at least from my vantage point as a modem gamer playing with mostly other modem players) very few LPBs, and those that I recall playing with -- especially in the Q1 days -- were pretty good and knew how to exploit their LPBness.
Now, however, it's a whole different story. You got SDSL users, wacky @home kiddies, whiny ADSL users, and the odd Starband user who invariably lands in your game, starts chatting about pings ("Hey, guys, I'm on Starband! Look at my terrible ping!") and then starts wanting to know you can see his new skin ("Hey, Kelso, can you see my new Skin?").
Ping times have gone down, but suckage -- at least from where I sit on my SDSL -- has gone way, way up. Which leads me to believe that the overall on-line gaming ain't what it used to be. When suckage is so high and pings are so low, you get discouraged.
Campers never bothered me, BFGers never bothered me, but there's nothing worse than a LPB that sucks.
a ping of <=80 is ok (Score:2)
railing with a ping of 80 is nearly impossible. sure you can hit someone if he stays on route but even im q3dm17 (longest yard) a good player wont be hit by a 80 player due some in air movement.
shafting has become easier in q3a than it was in qw since it has become more inexactly but with 150 there is no fun in wasteing 100 cells and hitting the oponent 2 times.
the plasma and even the rocketlauncher, due to the smaller splash damage area, are low to medium ping weapons.
the shotgun is a weapon which works with a high ping well. also one should not underestimate the power of this one but all the other weapons are low to med ping weapons.
the grenny (no not your grandma, the grenade launcher
now most of you will say woha, ping 80, thats what i dream about, and i think the poster also wants 150 fps. but i can only say: try it out. play with ping 150 and with 80 and 40. you will feel the difference. Even between 80 and 40.
you can even see a difference between 40 and something about the 20ies if you make much use of the shaft and the railgun.
with ping 150 you also can loose sounds and these are importent (not that much in a 4on4 than in a 1on1).
so whats left to say, 150 bad, 80 playable, <40 clanwar. playing a clanwar with a ping >40 pushes you to the loser site a bit.
that does not mean you can not win the game because tactics can be played at 80 and 150 and if your oponents have a ping of 20 but nothing than the pummel they wont be much of a thread