Wednesday, December 29, 1999

Fun with a 28.8K Modem -- 7:34 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

id's John Carmack updated his .plan with some fixes and a bunch of good tips for folks trying to play Quake III Arena on the 'Net with a 28.8K modem. Here's a sampling:

I have been playing a lot of Q3 on a 28.8 modem for the last several days.

I finally found a case of the stuck-at-awaiting-gamestate problem that turned out to be a continuous case of a fragment of the gamestate getting dropped. I have changed the net code to space out the sending of the fragments based on rate.

Note that there have been a few different things that result in stuck at gamestate or stuck at snapshot problems. We have fixed a few of them, but there may well still be other things that we haven't found yet.

You can still have a fun game on a 28.8 modem . . . Make sure your modem rate is set correctly. If you have it set too high, large amounts of data can get buffered up and you can wind up with multiple seconds of screwed up delays.

Only play on servers with good pings. My connection gives me a couple dozen servers with mid 200 pings. 56k modems often see servers with sub 200 pings. If you ignore the ping and just look for your favorite map, you will probably have a crappy game.
. . .
I just implemented "sv_minPing" / "sv_maxPing" options so servers can restrict themselves to only low ping or high ping players. This is done based on the ping of the challenge response packet, rather than any in-game pings. There are a few issues with that -- a LPB may occasionally get into a HPB server if they happen to get a network hiccup at just the right time, and the number used as a gate will be closer to the number shown in the server list, rather than the number seen in gameplay. I would reccomend "sv_minPing 200" as a reasonable breakpoint.

News for 12/29/1999

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