dealing with lag...

[PreTZeL]

hey, i was wondering, with the old JK engine it was that you pretty much had to hit a bubble around your target rather than the target himself, regardless of ping, now, with the quake engine, does that directly affect how lag will be compensated for? i have broadband (real nice one too) and lag doesnt bother me per se, but if really laggy people come on all in all how will it affect the overall gameplay? how will it be compensated for?

[WD_ToRMeNt]

JK2 with the quake 3 engine will handle lag COMPLETELY differant than the JK engine. Laggers will be at a major disadvantage :)

[PreTZeL]

PRAISE JESUS!!!
hehe, thatll make the population...enjoyable :D

[CaptainRAVE]

Lag doesnt bother me as i have a T3 connection. But my friend playing Quake 3 with his 56K modem has MAJOR lag.

[Chewie_Rips]

The new engine should help with the JK MP format, as most games are 3-4 players at a time. Although connection and sever is the main factor, the new engine will help leaser connections in the smaller games. Q3 Games, to my knowledge, usually have large player counts, so connection is more important here even with the more powerfull engine..

Bottom line: Lag will be better for JK2 MP games, but not entirely elimnated...to say the least. :D

[WD_ToRMeNt]

It also depends on what server you are on. If you live in a large city, you shouldn't have problems finding servers with pings of under 300, even if you have a 56k slodem.

I live in Kansas City MO (communications hub BTW) and I have 1500k DSL. It's easy for me to get on servers that have a ping of under 100 to me.

[ July 03, 2001: Message edited by: -WD- ToRMeNt ]

[CaptainRAVE]

Is a slodem a new form of connection?

[Chewie_Rips]

lol...yeah alot of newbs play with a slodem dial up connection..its just the way it goes...the good news is, hopefully more and more players will have options for dls or cable, by the time JKO is released....with more availble servers as Torment stated...but all theese factors will benifit everyone and the lag issue....time changes everything...

[Tap[RR]]

hmmm,q3 just released a new patch 1.29,and it improves the netcode once again,so now i get 180-240 ping,and im on a crappy 56k with aol x_x, so q3 netcode is good. :mad: :eek: :eek: ;)

[Tre Lightshadow]

YAY! There is hope for those of us on NetZero (with a 56K)!!!!!!!!!!!

[DeathBoLT]

One thing that really made me mad in JK was that people would tweak their modem to give themselves lag so they'd have an advantage.. :mad:

none of that for jk2 tho

[WD_ToRMeNt]

No joke.

[Kurgan]

Tweak their modem to add lag so they'd have an advantage??!

Are you serious? How would a person do this?

Would it really give you an "advantage" though? I never heard of such a thing...

Kurgan

[Tre Lightshadow]

Ya, people with lag in JK get an advantage. In JK, the other players see you after your computer sends to theres. So if it takes you 800 msecs, which is a lag of 800 (duh), it would take longer for the other players to see you than it would someone who would send in 400 msecs. Ok, that's probably not the best wording, but whatever.

[ July 04, 2001: Message edited by: Tre Lightshadow ]

[WD_ToRMeNt]

Im not going to tell you how to do it, but yes it is possible, and yes many people do it. There is even an advanced option in JK that allows you to mess with your net setting to gain an advantage. The JK netcoding is terrible.

[TheJackal_jk2]

LAG is important. I hate it. In the half-life engine I find that I have it allmost never. When I play Counter-Strike we are up to 32 players in total and I get not a single slow down.

HOWEVER! When I play SeriousSam I get too many TimeOut problems. It frustrated me a lot.

I hope lag issues are fixed with the Q3 engine for JK2 (I wouldn't know since I never played Q3)

[PreTZeL]

HL/CS engine = Quake engine ;)
just fyi, later

[Confed]

ok heres the deal in JK/MotS there were and still are people that open programs behind the game while they are playing to lag themselves *winamp or any program they can use that uses an internet connection* they were so use to playing with that lag that they knew how much to aim off and all that jazz where as people that werent use to playing with lag had a hard time hitting them.. anyone that has ever played scouts knows that you have to hit an invisible target (lag spot) with a high speed projectile while you are moving around.. it has to be a direct shot too non of this splash damage bs.. so anyone thats played it knows how much of a pain in the rear it is to play someone who lags themselves. ive played people in australia that were easier to hit than some of those people. anyway with JK 2 like most quake or UT powered games will have weapon lag more than likely.. so anyone that runs programs behind their crap will run into serious complications and their fun will be ruined.. hehe. even in tribes if you dont have at least a 56k running the best it can playing can be a pain 1second of lag is a great deal in JK/MotS it can be even worse for the person lagging in Tribes/UT/Quake/et cetera because they have to wait 1 second before their weapon fires after they hit the button.... not fun believe me i played tribes on a 33.6 with 3seconds and it was damn near impossible. but broad band users shouldnt have any problems with lag.. if they include scouts gameplay in JK2 like they did in MotS things will be interesting.
now that i get 3mb down 1mb up everything is more interesting.
anyway happy fourth.. hope everyone got as plastered as i did
*edit* holy geeze did i not seperate this into seperate paragraphs? HAHAHAHA oops too lazy to go back too, sorry

[ July 05, 2001: Message edited by: Confed ]

[ReAcToR]

Ya, people with lag in JK get an advantage. In JK, the other players see you after your computer sends to theres. So if it takes you 800 msecs, which is a lag of 800 (duh), it would take longer for the other players to see you than it would someone who would send in 400 msecs.


This isn't how the netcode works in JK/MotS. It's a peer-peer network code. If you ping someone at 500, they ping you at or around 500(if you were to ping one another at same time). 300-500 ping in JK/MotS is considered average.

"Ping" is similar to the sonar that bats use. Bats send out a pulse that will hit obstructions and then return to that bat, telling it how far away the obstruction is. Your computer sends out a pulse to the server and/or all players and it returns a signal letting you know how well your computers are communicating with one another.

I've heard about these modem tweaks being used for cheating in JK/MotS, but I've never really looked into it much. I suspect, if it is indeed true, that they somehow purposely lose packets. If you are losing packets left and right, only certain information is getting to the server and it can cause you to skip around(on opponents screen) like they're having 1 FPS or something. It's sort of similar to the Winamp cheapness. Certain soundcards don't allow you to use more than one program at a time that uses sound. If someone opens up their programs in the correct sequence, they won't hear their own sounds and this also causes the opponent not to hear the sounds as well(only on certain soundcards). Just another cheap method that people use in JK. Hard to know how bad you've damaged someone if you can't hear the hit-sounds.

[WD_ToRMeNt]

That's correct. It's not really the ping, it's the % of dropped/corrupted data packets. You can 1) mess with the settings in JK (I won't say which one or how) 2) Have programs that use net connections (such as napster) 3) Play with the setting of you modem/NIC (bitrate, baud, protocal exc...).

On the other hand, making lag for high pings can have advantages if you are host.

I've seen many "elite" players who have pings of under 500 but they constantly do short teleports all over the place. I could also talk about warping but that is a topic unto it's self.

Regardless, JK2 will make lag cheating a thing of the past (along with many of the NF saber "elites"). Trying this kind of thing with a q3 engine will get you killed before you saw the person who hit you.

[KirKanos]

Lag has alwasy been a problem, mabey JK2 will have additional multiplayer options, such as limmiting players joining based on there connection. Yeah it is far fetched but hey it might happen! (yea right)

Kir Kanos

[Wilhuf]

Yes, you can create low ping bastard (lpb) or high ping bastard (HPB) only servers with Q3 tech.

Server admins can set the minimum and maximum ping allowed to connect to your q3 tech server. So, if you want a modem-friendly HPB-only server, you could create one by capping the minimum ping (/sv_minping) to a higher value. E.g. players with a ping of 200 msec or higher only may connect.

Likewise, admins could cap the maximum ping (/sv_maxping)to create an LPB only server. E.g., players must have a ping of 100 msec or less to play.

Q3 tech also allows server admins to restrict the maximum transfer rate at which clients connect. For instance, a Q3 or Elite Force server can cap the client download rate per player, so that a high bandwidth player can't suck up all of the server upload bandwidth, making the game more friendly to low transfer rate modem players.

I usually cap the transfer rate on my server to be friendly to modem players.

[wardz]

AGH! Doesn't that mean for those of us on lower speed connections will be blocked all the time because people will get all high and mighty and cap the servers?

wardz

[Wilhuf]

Well, as I said I try to make my servers modem-friendly. :cool:

But you're right, if an admin wanted an lpb-only server they could easily cap the maximum ping to create an lpb only server.

Of course, admins could just as easily be high and mighty in favor of the modem player and cap the minimum ping.

Separating players by ping isn't necessarily a bad idea, btw. In theory, by creating hpb and lpb only servers, you put people on equal playing fields.

By separating into lpb and hpb only servers, ping for all players will be somewhat similar (hpbs v hpbs on one server, and lpbs v lpbs only on another server). You're less likely to find a 'ping disadvantage' on an lpb- or hpb-only server.

When hpb whiners complain about ping, one answer is to set up an hpb-only server so they can play with other hpbers who don't have a hypothetical 'ping advantage.' And, hpbers don't have to put up with being whooped by lpbers if they play on an hpb-only server.

Likewise, lpbers who play on lpb-only servers don't have to listen to the incessant whining about 'unfair ping' from the hpbers. Everyone's happy.

In practice, I haven't seen very many q3 or elite force hpb- or lpb-only servers. They do exist but not in great numbers. I'm not really worried that there will be some kind of 'ping division' that fragments the community. I doubt that there will be a huge number of lpb-only servers, and only a few hpb only JKO servers.

More than likely, most admins will just use default settings to allow both lpbers and hpbers, as they currently do with Q3 and Elite Force.

[ July 05, 2001: Message edited by: Wilhuf ]

[Lucky]

Tweaking your modem is just bs. You "tweak" it with a prog that smacks down the packets that tell you your gonna get hit. Its called a 'packet sniffer' and they have all sorts of uses. The prog does nothing to your modem.

People also 'tweak' with framerate, but thats just jibber jabber, cause they lose a lot of fine control when they do that and its utterly certain death in anything other'n nf sabs.

People have been known to induce lag into a game, or run a prog that interferes with their soundcards, because they either play better with the lag, or they play better mute and deaf.

Actually, the whole 'tweaking' thing came about back in the days of TweakDUN, and some folks still do that, tho not many cause it makes it difficult to play with. You can change the size of your packets, but it increases the interval on which they're sent. Good for d/l webpages, bad for somthing you need a constant stable connection to, like JK. And you obviously can't do it with a cable modem, so its pretty much died out, tho i know a few kids who try and slip it by.

TweakDUN aint gonna be no thang like a chickenwang in q3, cause its for dialupers and it'd prolly just make the server decide yer modem was retarded and boot you.

Framerate on the other hand has a factor in melee combat, I know it affects things in rune. So mebe, they'll fix that fer q3, tho I'm not even sure it would make a difference with the q3 engine.


Lucky

[wardz]

Actually wilhulf that doesn't sound like such a bad idea, all the complainers can off on their own and us poor relations of the gaming community can please ourselves.

wardz

[Wilhuf]

To answer the original question, 'how will a laggy player affect overal gameplay in the quake 3 engine?'

To a low ping bastard, the effect of a laggy opponent will be minimal to the extent that collision detection is done server side, rather than client-side. Since the q3 client-server model does not use synchronous clients, players can move about and shoot independent of other players' latency.

If there is client-side collision detection for hitscan weapons (as is done in Half-Life), then laggy players will enjoy a real advantage over LPBers. According to the June Game Developers Magazine (http://www.gdmag.com/), for example, to compensate for lag, Half-Life uses client-side collision detection for hitscan weapons such as the mp5 and shotgun.

Under this lag compensation, even if you lag as a 'slodem' player, if you see a target and shoot it, your PC will make the caclulation locally (client side) to determine if you've hit the target. The hit is sent to the server, which then assesses if the collision is plausible. If it is plausible, then the hit is registered. So, in Half-Life, with hitscan weapons you shoot at what you see, not at where you 'think' the target is. This is not the case with projectile weapons, such as rockets, where the server determines the collision detection, not the client.

So, how is this a disadvantage to the LPBer? Well, if the target is an LPBer, the HPBer could be looking at a gamestate that is a few hundred miliseconds behind what the LPBer sees. This means the LPBer could be shot by the HPBer 'back in time.' The LPBer may not even see where the shots come from, but still take hits.

The LPBer may think, "hey, I hid behind this crate, I should take no damage!" But that doesn't matter, since on the HPB's screen, the HPB saw the LPB target and was able to shoot it before the LPBer hid behind the crate. The server agreed with the client-side collision judgement, and registered a hit against the LPB.

There are cases also, where even if a hit is made client-side, that the server determines that a hit really is not possible. This is lag compensation, especially for HPBs.

The knife cuts both ways, however. The LPBer can use client-side collision detection as well. The difference is that LPBers won't be shooting from as far 'back in time' against their targets.

It's all hypothetical anyway. JKO may not even use client-side collision detection. I'd prefer that it doesn't, and instead use the server-side collision detection to reduce the incentive for client-side cheating.

[ July 05, 2001: Message edited by: Wilhuf ]

[WD_ToRMeNt]

If JK uses client side BS I just might get mad enough to dig out my 33.6 slodem and sign up for netzero. I would rather not have to do that however. Im sick of laggers in JK, in JK2 I might just join them if I have to.

In truth though, i doubt JK2 will use client side anything to prevent many kinds of cheating (like q3 does).

[Wilhuf]

You won't get any real advantage if you join the laggers (excluding the lag compensation, if it is even implemented. Even if it were, LPBers could also use client-side collision detection).

There is no large, invisible target bubble that varies with latency in Q3 tech. Instead you shoot at what you see, with only minor forward shooting adjustment if you have high latency. You'd be better off sticking with the LPBs. As has been said, high latency will not effectively shield you from opponents in Q3 tech. Moreover, the high latency makes it that much more difficult for you to shoot targets.

And it won't be possible to 'block' the 'you've been hit' packets since the server will determine player health and shields, not the client.

Actually, if client-side collision could be insulated from cheats, it could work. For instance, JKO 'pure servers' could validate that the client-side collision detection was also 'pure' by checking the pak or other source files.

Although it's not impossible to hack client collision detection and still pass the checksum. There are additional checks that would also have to be passed.

Also, it would be critical that the server could override a client-side collision determination. This would address the 'getting shot from back in time' problem somewhat.

Would be nice to get Kenn Hoekstra's feedback on how JKO's networking is going to be implemented.

[ July 06, 2001: Message edited by: Wilhuf ]

[PreTZeL]

yes...wouldnt that be nice, a professional opinion for once :D heh, just kiddin, but wilhuf, id like to say that you are very computer smart, and im glad you had things to offer regarding lag, it sheds some light on the game immersed in shadow!

[CaptainRAVE]

Actually, if im the one with lag, when i used to have my 56K modem it was quite fun. Now with my T3 when other people get lag it is really annoying. And when you say "there was lag, thats why i lost", they dont believe you. Noone should be allowed onto a server if they have got a rubbish connection. :) No offence to anyone with a rubbish modem :D

[mattpitt]

Well i live in this place called the UK. I have a 56k modem as do most people in this country but i'd love a T3 pr ADSL connection the thing is everything that is remotely good over herte is expensive! So the chances of me and others getting these broadband connections isn't likely in the next year at least. Well ythats wat i think :)

[CaptainRAVE]

56k modems are annoying. The computer im on at the moment has a 56K modem. It totally sucks and web pages take ages to load. :mad:

[acdcfanbill]

well, i tweaked my 56k modem to run at a hundred something, and no one complain about lag to me... course i dont play a lot of big laggy games on the net, but JK runs just fine.

[Lucky]

Wilhuf are you sure thats how it works? That makes no sense really.

If a person shoots at another client, why would the server have to verify anything with what you just described? seeing if it *was* possible is essentially seeing if the client hit what he shot at on his own computer. I mean there's nothing for the server to verify. I mean you'd think that system would just about never work, it would work if someone was standing still or if they ran in a straight line or happened to recross where they just were.

BTW, there's no "sphere" that you can hit in JK, its just where the person actually is, its a person sized object, that looks and is animated just like the person. a "sphere" is just a way of thinkin about it.

Lucky

[PreTZeL]

wilhuf is right, its called lag compensation, i forgot how it works, but it is integrated into the serverside cvars and such (maybe not cvars, but serverside)
as for the sphere issue, yeah, you are right, but sometimes people say "sphere" for easier reference, as compared to "an animated person sized object"
later

[Wilhuf]

The lag compensation I described is a paraphrase from Yahn Bernier, a member of Half-Life's developer team. He wrote an article in the June Game Developer (http://www.gdmag.com) magazine describing Half-Life's lag compensation based on client side collision detection.

Yes, the Half-Life server does verify client-side determinations for hits. This is to ensure that players aren't being hit in completely impossible ways, such as far around corners.

As I said, this type of lag compensation is for Half-Life, which uses a heavily modified Quake engine. Jedi Outcast may not even use this type of compensation.