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How Fast Too Slow? A Study Of Quake Pings
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."
As of today, I just worked my first day at a gaming company that is preparing a new entirely online RPS game. Because the game is entirely online, they are taking very serious consideration into the needs of the network and the players that will be connecting over that network. Thus, comes me. I am their new network engineer who is currently reviewing their current router and switch setup, how their network topology is set up, and making suggestions on how to change things before their network goes live. To say the least, they are taking the network lag time very very seriously. They know that most people do not have broadband yet, and are aiming for 56K modem dialup users. I now have to do things like packet capture analisis to figure out the packet patterns of the game client, and how to maximise transit priorities for these packets. This, among other projects for their networks.
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!
An interesting study might have been the average score for each ping, and seeing where the dropoff area was, rather than just people who quit or never joined.
Now why can't someone do this study on framerate and settle THAT argument? :P
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!
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
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.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
The affect on latency by the speed of light is roughly 187.5 miles per millisecond. On long distance games that could have a large affect, but it sounds like the problem has more to do with poor physical routing of networks. In an ideal world you wouldn't have a ping time over 80ms to anywhere on earth.
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...
-- The unsig...
AT&T through Bell Labs did some research into a similar subject. They found that the suite spot for interactivity for voice conversations was no more than a 150 msec delay. Any more than that and you end up having halting conversations, stalls in discussion, misunderstandings, etc.
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.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Ping times determine the latency of a given connection. Latency is the time that it takes to get one response from a server to a client upon the client's request. Bandwidth affects latency- and is just about one of the only things you can do to impact it. Switches insert latency. Routers insert latency. Modems insert latency. Heavy traffic inserts latency. Once you get latency, you can never rid yourself of it without major changes to your infrastructure. To put this all in perspective: The average latency without heavy traffic losses for a xDSL node to the frame relay at the DSLAM is something like 5-15 msec. The average latency for a Cable node to a border router is something about 30-50 msec on an unloaded segment. The average latency for a dialup modem (of ANY speed) is 250 msec- about 1/4 of a second. The average latency for an 100-base-T adapter is 1-3 msec. The average router latency is something like 2-5 msec. The latency on frame relay can be a couple of msec if it's not loaded to hundreds of msec as it gives higher priority packets credence under load. Each one of these things add up- and fast. And these don't go away unless you rip them out for faster equipment- adding bandwidth doesn't make those parts of the latency go away. That "speed of light" ping time you referred to just went "poof" because it was ate by the intervening hardware.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
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 (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
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
well in general (ever since the days of standard Q1 tourneys) 150 was the standard cut off for HPB/LPB. Granted, 150 in Q3 is different than 150 in Q1, but the same idea applies.
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.
I won't play in a server with a Ping greater than 80ms :) and there are literally hundreds of servers I can play in.
:) The days of broadband mean sub 100 ms pings should be in order.
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....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
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 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--
Program Intellivision!
Don't get me wrong, I like the game - but I'd rather play it than read about it continually.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
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.
--
>> I guess he changed his mind somewhere along the line... because Q3 is almost always won by the lpb.
:-)
:)
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
I use @home and my ping times between ~8o and 55836514768147533222218 milliseconds. Is this usual for @home to have such a high latency?
cpeterso
PHB's would love you to think that the internet is used primarily for business email (upper management email tends to be MORE important btw. even if it is to schedule the wife's baby shower) and for people surfing corporate sites for *valuable* marketing information.
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.
Thank you :)
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
this
Ping times never measured speed... and even in the allmighty highly-developed US Internet, it's quite common for a cable user in one place to be unable to play a proper game of quake with someone elsewhere in the US, due to high latency.
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.
There's nothing new here which hasn't been considered for years in the haptics research community (haptics == feel/touch). Basically it comes down to our neurological wiring ... we've trained our brain to accept a certain combination of inputs occuring within a certain time-threshold to be "simulatenous" or help us guage our sense of space/distance. This impacts our motor coordination (close your eyes, stretch out your arm, can you guess how far away it is?). Why can't we hear underwater? Because our ears are tuned to the directional differential in sound reaching separate ears based on the permeability of air. Underwater we don't have the software/(wetware :-)?) to recalibrate so it appears diffuse and non-directional. Motion sickness where the sight of moving objects is in disequilibrium with our inner ear balance is another example. Psychological experiments (your research dollars at work :-)) show that people can tickle themselves if them interpose a variable delay between anticipation (e.g. pushing a button on a feater machine) and the sensation.
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
I've been playing Quake - both LAN and online - an average of 2-3 hours a day for the past 5+ years now, using a wide variety of connections, and know a lot of quakers irl, so I'm quite familiar with what people find acceptable, at least here in Sweden/Scandinavia.
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...
Which makes sense, really.. for a short distance connection the amount of time spent in the fiber is insignificant; switching time dominates.
For a longer distance connection, of course, things change.
-misao
Tips on how to frag a LPB when you have +250 ping: 1. The LPB is using quake as an IRC client. Since low pings usualy correlate with ISP fixed rates they just hang in there chatting. 2. The LPB is looking at something in the wall or making salutes to another LPB and you pack a railgun. 3. All the LPBs are fighting for the rocket launcher and you make some lucky frags just by shooting at random through the stop-motion of the jumping LPBs. 4. The LPB is so lame that you frag him before he thows himself into the lava. 5. If the LPB has a rocket lauucher and is low on heath, then you might make him lose a frag by forcing him to shoot when you run against him.
you're thinking of the 'normal distribution' which looks like what some people call a "bell curve". Needless to say, normal distribution is exactly that, normal ;-) of course it isnt, which is the biggest falacy in statistics.
The poisson is used to model events, such as the number of calls at a business, etc.
So, has FPS finally entered the Fragbruary that never ends?
I don't think there is enough evidence to be conclusive. How do know if people won't tollerate 200 ms because it's too slow for them to use, or because there are faster (i.e., lower ping) servers available? I would imagine most people can find a server with a ping time at least under 150, so why would they chose a slower server if they don't have to?
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
It would be even nicer if you could vary any or all of the following independantly and get the results:
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.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
I don't follow how he got the measure of 150ms as what people prefer. What the data really shows is that most people who connected to his quake server had a ping time of under 150ms (which actually covers most of the US from the plots he drew).
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.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
"Ping times no longer measure network speed except in very highly congested networks.
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!
Interesting comparison data....
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 -
One thing I have noticed about Quake vs Unreal in network mode is Unreal handles network latency a lot better. I can have much worse ping times in Unreal, but the experience is somehow better.
Based on analysis of a QuakeIII server over two months in early 2001, first person shooter (FPS) game players strongly prefer servers that are within 150 milliseconds of the player's attachment point to the Internet. Or put another way, if you are planning on hosting a for-fee FPS server service, you should forget about trying to get customers who are more than 150 milliseconds away from your servers. Sections of the Internet more than 150 milliseconds away will provide a minimal source of regular players (and hence minimal revenue).
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.
I've played quakeworld competitively for some time. I was just an average player, but when I was playing with a ping of 14ms while others were playing with more than 100ms, there were very few people who could beat me. Once you're past a certain level of skill and strategy, ping times count big time.
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)
It's not the framerates that make the difference. Seeing 32 or 100 frames per second doesn't make (much) of a difference. Yes, you can see the difference, but that's just cosmetic.
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.
That's the spirit, just leave out the '0h-he's-typing-so-let's-not-frag-him' semi-politeness, just frag the LPB. Camping is a ligitimate HPB tactic as well.
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.
You're absolutely right (at least on some points :-)
;-)
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.
Packet loss is very bad indeed, because it momentarily doubles or triples (or worse) your ping. If that happens often enough, the gameplay sucks bigtime. But there no way anybody can play quake competitivly with a ping over 200ms.
Johan V.
A trip to the other side of the world and back takes about 133ms. So the lightspeed is definately a limiting factor. I've never had an OZ on my own quakeserver who wasn't complaining about my ungodly low ping (I live in Europe, Australia approximately the other side of the world for us).
Johan V.
Have you thought of the cheating possibilities, I guess not. Pings can very easily be faked. You don't want people running around your server who seamingly have a ping of 750ms, while in fact they have a sub 15ms ping.
Johan V.
I made the same statements until recently (I succesfully kicked the Quakeworld habit).
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.
You're absolutely right. A better experiment would involve manipulating 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 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.
The thing is... A game with robustly coded prediction (such as Q3) can do reasonably well with times up to 300ms. The problem is that as your ping gets above 150ms, you get a lot more packet loss as well. And when your packet loss spikes, prediction is MUCH harder. If I were paying for a gaming oriented ISP, I would put guaranteed throughput above low ping on my priority list.
Of course, games whose prediction engines are notably worse (*ahem*UnrealTournament*ahem*) will suffer both from packet loss and high ping.
-Ted
Why didn't they just ask a few gamers?
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
> Thank you :)
:)
;-)
t ure04/Slide22.html
u rces/Shading/21.html
n gApplet.htm
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
> 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?
:-)
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.
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 :)
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.
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
Wasn't "improved networking code" one of the main selling points of Q3? I seem to remember Carmack saying that ping would matter less. I guess he changed his mind somewhere along the line... because Q3 is almost always won by the lpb.
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, 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.
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
It all depends on the person
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.
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I just thought I'd interject something that someone else may be able to twist relevence out of. The human body can time actions much more finely than the average error in neuron firing time. That is, if sending a pulse down your arm to release the baseball takes 25 +/- 5 ms, a person may very well be able to release the ball at some point with accuracy of +/- 1 ms. This is because we don't just use a single neuron firing to do the release, but several, and release when a threshhold is reached (adding independent variables reduces the variance).
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.
Huh, well aparently I'm one of those exceptions... Course I've played online FPS games since they began & I've never had a real low ping conenction (I still can't get one even though I live right by a big city). Playing on a mdoem for years, you learn the tactics that let you win... Sure I can't always win, but I have a higher than average chance...
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...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Well if the Telcos would get off their asses we could have real DSL (even rural it's easy to still live less than 15k' from a CO, I live at 5k' form mine) out here in rural areas... But we are seen as markets unable to support the cost of the equipment (which is not true, as the basic costs would only require 6 people for a year of service to pay for).
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...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I in fact have... They give me the runaroudn until someone 'puts me on hold' & I get disconned... They don't give a rats ass about my area or me aparently... The only ones who are helpful are their service techs, who have been nice enough to tell me how little the company would have to do to support DSL for our area... If I had any other choice in a telco I'd toss Verizon to the curb...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
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
I guess now every one that sucks at Q3A will say: you know those damm long ping times is what is killing me.
Ping latency may make you loose some times but not all times.
"In God we trust, all others must bring data" - W. Edwards Deming
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.
Got Rhinos?
I play play quake. Back in the day I was limited to 56k dialup with actual connection speeds of 45-50. I lowest ping times I could find were 125+ and I was usually connected at 150 and could manage to hold my own in a game. Anything over 160 is difficult and will leave you schooled.
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.
We have the best government that money can buy.
Ping times no longer measure network speed except in very highly congested networks. For the past 5 years networks have been fast enough that the largest contributor to round-trip times is simply the speed of light. (in a fiber-optic cable, or the speed of an electronic signal down a copper wire, either way about 2/3 c).
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.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I can not really understand the point of the article. As he states player choose the first server that has activity at lowest ping. Often that is within 150ms. Thats more of a fact than preferenace of ping time.
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?
--
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
I find it truly amusing that the 150 msec time quoted is very similar to the results of research done on the PLATO system 30 years ago. They found that the limit for interactivity was about 100 msec. PLATO was one of the first nationwide timesharing systems. Lots of things people take for granted these days (like netnews, multiplayer games, chat, and tons more) were pretty much invented on PLATO -- and it ran on terminals that had 512x512 resolution flat panel plasma displays, programmable character sets, line drawing, etc; and it all ran over 1200 baud modems.
"World Domination - a fun, family activity"
I find a ping of more than 50 intolerable. I won't play a game at 100 or more.
------------------------ LordLobo - Because I can
What was tested here isn't what latency people can really feel but what reported time causes them to look for another server. Yeah i dig that. But watch people in games, the hardcore gamers have their set ping ranges. You see some guy on a 45ms dls feed that aways goes to the same servers, he'll complain, and possibly suck, if he hits a 70ms server. And he'll log off and hunt for a better serv.
Now weirder yet, people find confort zones. I've known people that are used to a steady 8- ping, that don't like competing on servers where they will get a much lower, better ping, simply becasue it will 'throw them off'.
I agree though, people are conditioned to accept certain hard lines between a good ping and bad, or a good and ad anything taking it further, and its often not the case.
I figure a lot of it has to do with a) what we are used to. And b) how fast we are as people.
:)
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.
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.
Will I retire or break 10K?
flamebait? it's a joke!! geez... can we re-evaluate who gets mod points based on their witty-ness?
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
I guess my avian carrier network just isn't fast enough!
~$ 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
And yes, you are correct: qw==strategy q3==ping/aim. Again, check out Promode for an entirely different way of playing q3.
-Elendale
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
Packet loss is *Infinitely* worse than a little latency! I don't play Q3 (slow comp) but I'm a Counterstrike addict, and I can't count the number of times when I've clicked the mouse button and no bullets came! That's packet loss for ya - the packet saying "fire" just... vanishes. And in a one-shot, one-kill game like CS, that's a killer - literally. Since it seems to happen a lot during comp-heavy times (ie. large firefights) it's especially bad. But I guess it's an accurate simulation of your gun jamming :-)
Freedom: "I won't!"
Ping DOES matter.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
It happens all the time.. someone will join a HPB server using a spoofer and own... yet another way losers cheat =)
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
Back in my day, we had 350 pings to Kali, and we were lucky! I remember that some players were so obsessed with winning, they would spend their Burger King paycheques at Internet cafes just to get the LPB advantage the T1 provided. Paying $7.00/hr to kick CTF butt on McKinley Base, they were at the top of the food chain!
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.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
My high pings helped make me go HWG in TFC. Only a headshot would allow a LPB to get me before I could at least shoot back.
Well, HWG and Engy.
Anyhow, imagine a HWG training on servers with 250 ms ping times (anything above 350 is too slow for me), and occasionally dropping in on servers in town. Heh.
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Aside from the packet loss factor, I don't think ping is necessarily the most important factor in internet game lag. Yes, it is important, but how a given game _handles_ that lag is what makes the difference.
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.
I knew this by observation 3 + years ago...infact its really more like sub 80 to be truely comfortable.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Ok so we know what the ping distribution of users on his server is. And we have a reasonable idea of the level of usage classified in various ways (domain, location etc). What if now he were to artifically increase the ping rate a little bit every week.
I seem to recall that little gadget that attached to a network which would simulate any sort of network condition you could think of (dropped packets, retransmits, latency etc). Put that bad boy on there, or code up the server in some other way to increase ping, say 10 ms, every week and watch how usage drops. Maybe he should also add in some level of increased packet loss. As someone else mentioned high latency is often times accompanied by high packet loss and then it starts to hurt Quake's prediction (ie try to really simulate what it is like to be a HPB). I think this is what will really let us see if there is a limit where people, who on avereage would hit your server, now start going away ni search of lower pings.
It's called the scientific method. We have our control server that we observed in the wild and got a baseline. Now lets add the test server and see how changing it's behavior effects usage. THAT is how to really do a test.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
What this really says more about is the number of servers one can reach. I normally start up Quake, let it grab a few hundred (out of several thousand) servers, and pick the one that looks best based on Ping time, Map, and Number of openings. The more servers I check on, the more servers I see that will meet my criteria. If there are very few servers, I'll raise my criteria (more maps, higher ping, etc). 150 appears to be a magic number, but all that really says is that his server is an average server of people with a 150 ping. (did that make sense) Read the article, it's interesting. But he's wrong.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
150 ping ...
;)
I remember back when I was on a 28.8 dialup line through Primenet. They had the greatest backbone (atleast in my area) at that time. This one server I played on (was approx. 200 miles away) gave me a 140-160 ping on my 28.8 modem (I *always* connected at 26400bps or 28800bps), and although I was on a old USR Sportster modem, it felt like playing on an ISDN or something. Ping was great, packet loss was minimal, and hardly ever got spikes.
Of course living in a rural area, you might not experience the same phone line quality that I did. I could see you connecting at 21600bps and such, which would provide nowhere the same experience.
Of course there's always ISDN or IDSL for you rural types - if the telcos actually get off their butts and install the necessary equipment.
You can only hope
Whats really cool about it is since vie dropped subspace from their list of supported games the community has been responsible for the server and client. They released their own server a few years ago and 2 weeks ago released their own client called continuum and they might even do a linux port :) :) :)
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
To me 250ms is a good ping. 225ms is heaven for a enternal 56k modem. My mothers computer can go down to 210ms because its an internal but its a win-modem which can't run on Linux. But in regards to high speed access I have to say......
....Am I the only one held hostage by mega-telco, with regards to high speed access? THis is so unfair. In the northeast where I live the maga-telephone companies lobbied to prevent competition from my area. I live in an apartment in New York City where it was pre-wired with verizon phone lines and time-warner cable. Basically, I was so supposed to have high speed access 2 years ago but Time-warner sued RCN and @home to prevent them from offering me service. THey claimed the cable was their intellectual property and removing it is infact stealing service?? Also dsl providers do not want to piss off verizon so I have no dsl either. All your lpb and those who can download linux for free can go to hell! I feel so left behind the times like I am still stuck with a p75.
http://saveie6.com/
In UT I always love using the snipper rifle in the face level but with such pings from a 56k external modem, its hopeless. I hit a guy just the other day at close range 3 times in the head and neck area, but lag prevented me from a head shot.
:-)
Its all those sleezy low ping bastards are the real killer snippers! The can shoot you in the head before you even knew they were there. As soon as I get high speed access I want to get as many headshots as possible agaisn't the 56k modem users,
http://saveie6.com/
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.
Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that. -CP
I say we put this guy in a quake3 railgun match against
you see the pattern, but do you grasp the principle?
hom3r
I say we put this guy in a quake3 railgun match against sub 50ms lpb for 5 mins. Then we'll see how "satisfying" he considers his 150ms ping.
you see the pattern, but do you grasp the principle?
hom3r
You can of course get score verses ping type information from ngWorldstats The quake data seems to be just archives of Lan parties, however the unreal tournamate data does show that players with an average ping of 200+ dont tend to be the ones with the high scores :-)
-- Vagnerr - (www.vagnerr.com) Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Yet most dynamic content systems don't do keep-alive. What have we learned since 1997?
I think server operators should lower their 'maxrate' setting so that LPB cant hog all the servers bandwidth when they connect. Make things a littel more even for everyone and the game will be better for everyone. Just my opinion though! -Rex "40 Dog" Ruther
-"The early bird catches the worm, but the late bird sleeps the most"
Just wondering (sorry if this sounds harsh), but implications for what, besides like, CounterStrike? I can't imagine anything out there right now that places good ping higher on the priority list than reliable transactions.
Is bad ping holding back other possible things, like maybe television via the internet or something?
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
*rambles on for a while while riding backwards on a horse...*
You can't have pi apples, but you can have apple pi!
People are self-maximizing. If you really want to improve your game, put in some sort of "server monitor" feature/option. Then you could have a notification system and stuff. That way if a server that was full gets some space or if a better ping pops up, you can change.
Alternatively, use of UDP seems to boost pings. I know it did for ZSNES ;).
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Open Source Sysadmin
Here in Fiartfax, Va, I get horrible service from road runner cable modem, right now things are the best it ever has beem, but my ping time to the very first hop is 30-60, and its 100+ before it leaves their network, and thats not during prime time.
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.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Hi, my name is -=KOC=-Genotype 47XXY[BA] and I am a Low-Ping Bastard
Seriously now, I usually have around 100 ping - but smoke grenades in Counter-Strike severely lag me out, and in big games, I get dropped packets and lag while my computer waits to process all the data it gets.
Just because you have a low "ping" time, all that means is your computer can send a 32-byte ICMP packet and back in 1/10th of a second. It doesn't necessarely mean that the useful data is as fast.
=-=-=-=-=
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
As far as I know Half life and its mods (Counter strike etc...) use this system allready.
Acaila
Growing Old is Inevitable; Growing Up is Optional.
I don't find ping ever to be a problem. The issue is the relative pings. If everyone was put to the same [dis]advantage pings wouldn't matter. As it is I get peeved when I play a game of CTF and the team with the lower pings wins. In team games, the sum of a teams ping values probably determines who wins. Ideally we need servers that only allow people with a very specific ping range to join (Apparently the capabilities are there in the Q3 server, but I never see them) and let other people join of their ping is lower than the range, but implement a delay so that their ping becomes the minimum allowed. It's a great shame we can't up the speed of light! Mike
-- Mike
The scores vs. ping times. That would show not where the players "feel" that the ping is to high, but where it actually hits the magic point that people start to appear less skillful.
My server
This is why I stopped playing Q3A. I have a cable modem and I rarely get pings >150. But it became very apparent to me that Q3A had become a game of "my ping is better than you ping". Everytime I would win a DM its was due to my superior ping. Playing against players with a ping >150-200 was a turkey shoot, though some players seem to be able to compensate quite nicely. Railguns - ya right. I don't know how many times I had someone dead in my sites only to discover I had actually not shot them - although according to my computer it hit. Likewise, I can recall have run up to a weap, seeing it come into hand and then two or three steps later it disappears only to show up in the hand of the player that "I thought" I had beat to the weapon. Nothing like turning to blast someone with a rocket launcher only to have it morph back into the gun and also finding yourself staring down the barrel of a r-launcher you swore you picked up!
Hell ya! Players now are so rude and immature. Do you remember Q1 times? You could actually get i games with the top player in the world! I played games against Kornelia when I was in school in the early 90's. That never happens now, good players flee to private servers.
Back in the good old fun days of Quake 1, 300ms was considered OK. 200 was the best you could generally hope for on dialup, and at the onset of someone in the double digits entering the server, said server would clear out.
To all you sore loozers: I'll just point out that just as in the real world, in the virtual world those who invest in good tools have an advantage.
All of these factors come into play. I used to be real into Kingpin (game/grfx wise between Q2 and q3) multiplayer and a lot of what is said is true: A) you get used to HPB/LPB's (or being one) B) Suckage/llamas'ness shows thru regardless of ping. My best laff was this: Kingpin, 8bit color, P200 64M of memory, 8M voodoo2 with a 150'ish ping. I was doing so well with 2 other players I suggested they gang up and "hunt me". After they had had enough of a beating, one of them asked my system specs thinking I was running a screaming rig. His partner just let out with a "BWAhhhahahahah, you're kidding, right?" He told his buddy it was funny, seeing as he was running "A dualie 650, NT with the latest directX and a TNT2 and smp enabled on the game and STILL could not beat me with help"... The guy's reply to his bud, was STFU. Worst part of all this was I considered myself an average player. Players that could make me cry kept telling me to get a better rig seeing as what I could do on a dinky p200. Heh, I wish. I still got that p200 (i think it is on its 6th or 7th year...oye).
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
No matter what my ping time is, I still keep blowing my stupid self up with the rocket launcher. :(
The more interesting time is to correlate ping times to suckage. I remember the Quake1 days where LPB's were very highly regarded -- and whenever one appeared on the server, all the modem users would hit their little chat keys and gripe about the LPB that just joined the game.
"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.
What if accuracy were tied to ping? Specifically, what if the higher the average ping in a game was, the more forgiving the game would be of shot accuracy? In other words, in a low ping game you'd have to actually hit someone's body to hit them, but in a high ping game you could just hit in the "ping zone" around a player's body which grows with ping. That way, people wouldn't make a shot that was accurate when they fired, but missed because of lag.
I'm the stranger...posting to
playing with a ping greater than 80 just suxx (sorry for that).
:>) is a hp weapon if you use it to mine a whole area but aimed in air hits are not really makeable.
:)
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