Friday, December 17, 1999

My Experiences with UTDemo's Netcode -- 3:09 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

It's a slow news day (and I'm trying to avoid doing actual work). Therefore I decided that seeing I have tested Q3A and Q3ADemo's netcode quite a bit, I should become more familiar with UT's. I've been playing a bit of UT online and have found a couple of things to be true. I was on one server with a ping between 230-280. It was close to unplayable. The weapon firing animation is client side, but the actual firing is not, so you see your weapon kick, then a smidge later the rocket/plasma/whatever fires. Very disconcerting. When I began to drop some packets I got the "warping" effect where the server would inform my client that I really hadn't run that far yet so I'd be yanked backwards as soon as my client updated. Blech. Both of these make it very hard to compensate for lag.

On the other hand, I was on another server and my ping was between 150-180. There it was very nice and very playable (despite the one j@ck@$$ with auto-taunt turned on who was shooting everyone in the back). Since I haven't played UT enough, I was thinking about which weapon to use way too much and getting picked off too easily.

I guess that if the connection is bad (200-300 ping) I find it easier to compensate for lag with Q3A than with UT. With a sub-200 ping, both games play very nicely and very smoothly. Kudos to the guys at Epic for taking Unreal's abysmal netcode and turning it into something rather nice!

The Master comments: From what I'm reading on the Q3ACoding mail list, the UT network code feels like an intermediate Quakeworld, which is pretty cloes to what A.T. is describing. That's still a huge step from Unreal.

News for 12/17/1999

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