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Carmack's dotplans are always interesting history to read. If you weren't a gamer (or alive) at the time when quakeworld came around, you might not appreciate
by SmirkingRevenge 7y ago
Carmack's dotplans are always interesting history to read.
If you weren't a gamer (or alive) at the time when quakeworld came around, you might not appreciate how amazing it was for multiplayer games on the internet. On dial-up, you were lucky to have 150ms latency. Before client-side-prediction, that latency applied to every action you took in game, including player movements. Hit the up-arrow, and you wait 150-300ms before the game responds and moves your character forward. CSP really was an amazing break through, and made multiplayer action games feasible on the internet.
This is particularly relevant now, that we are entering the era of cloud-based streaming game platforms, like Stadia. The latency problems of the pre-CSP 90's will be rearing their heads again. Its going to be interesting to see how these same problems will be tackled in this new context. Internet speeds are higher now, but so are our expectations.
I doubt we'll have the nice, simple dotplan files that Carkmack left for us to read and remember, from all the SRE's at Google, sadly.
- FooHentai 7y ago>we are entering the era of cloud-based streaming game platforms, like Stadia. The latency problems of the pre-CSP 90's will be rearing their heads again. Its going to be interesting to see how these same problems will be tackled My take is that it'll be the a primary competitive point, nearly as important as the library available. Companies that can deliver the service without introducing these issues will succeed and ones that cannot will fail. If nobody can reliably crack it, cloud gaming won't take off. Back in the 90s there was no viable competitor aside from LAN parties, and those weren't available to you every evening.
- bni 7y agoThere was modem dialup between two players though. Among my circle of friends in 94/95 there was someone who wanted to play DOOM every night. The games was often coordinated during the day at school, or later by phone. Also I agree that is not a given that "Cloud gaming" will take off. We have emerging VR were latency is absolutely critical, even more so than for FPS e-sports
- FooHentai 7y agoYeah I remember that. There were also some gaming-specific low-latency premium-rate dialup services (e.g. Wireplay in the UK) that hosted game servers on-net. With the right TCP/IP settings and Modem firmware, you could get very close to the minimum theoretical modem latencies with barely any jitter, and it made a big difference.
- VectorLock 7y agoNow and as it was then the game maker controls the viability of its game's ecosystem. Some game companies think its a market advantage to have open hosting, mod ability, and some don't.
- VectorLock 7y agoI was thinking the other day how simple and elegant dotplans were. They were truly the original social media.
- devit 7y agoYou can't really do prediction if you are not rendering the game locally, so all you can do is have a lot of servers all over the world and rely on most customers having a low latency fiber link.
- Vogtinator 7y agoThe servers could predict what the user does in the next 100ms. Not the same kind of CSP, but fits well into "powered by AI" marketing...
- neiman 7y agoThey probably would, but the creative players would suffer from it. AI never predicts creativity.
- fsiefken 7y agoPerhaps if you train the model on the existing movement and action history of the particular player
- Slartie 7y agoOh, that's a great idea! Stadia could sell it as an add-on to players which not only don't want to play their games themselves, but also aren't satisfied by watching other people play through their games on YouTube or Twitch. With this add-on, they can finally watch themselves play through their games, without having to lift a finger to, you know, actually play!
- animal531 7y agoThey would make a killing on Twitch, where a streamer could just buy someone else's training data and use that instead of playing themselves.
- 7y ago
- wink 7y agoIt's funny. Sure, DSL brought the (much) bigger bandwidths, but when moving from ISDN to DSL, ping times increased again and it made total sense to play ESL matches over telephone dialup instead of DSL. But either they improved or it's just the normal. Anyway, I stopped playing shooters in the early 00s and so I don't really care anymore. source: German who never had a 56k modem but started with ISDN in 1998 and can't really remember a ping > 100 on EU servers ;)
- vardump 7y ago> but when moving from ISDN to DSL, ping times increased again and it made total sense to play ESL matches over telephone dialup instead of DSL. Telekom used "interleave" by default, which provided very slightly faster download speeds. And caused about 70 ms latency to the first hop. I had to contact them and ask them to change my ADSL to "fast path". This dropped the latency to maybe 20 ms (IIRC, my memory might fail me on this number). I think ISDN was about 40 ms to first hop, but again, it's been a long time.
- wink 7y agoThanks for the reminder! Yes, I remember fast path. But if memory serves it wasn't immediately available with the 768kbit plan, only a little later. Or at least the knowledge hadn't widely spread.
- vardump 7y agoI guess it was available in a few months after it was launched? Yeah, you had to know about it and request it from the service number. AFAIK, it wasn't mentioned in any instructions etc.
- nickjj 7y agoSadly we live in a world today where some local code editors could really benefit from CSP because they add 100-200ms of latency to every character you press. I'm not sure if it's funny or sad that there's more key press latency typing into most local Electron apps than connecting to a Quake 3 server 200 miles away back when I had 56k dial-up in 2000. If you want to fast forward to today's internet, with an average internet connection it takes around 150ms to ping a server in the Netherlands from California. That's over 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers). Somehow a local key press has the same latency with certain code editors. What have we gotten ourselves into.
- nikanj 7y agoNot just Electron either, writing an email in Outlook frequently gives me half-a-second pauses before the typing catches up with the cursor
- universenz 7y agoAh, so the Outlook lag isn't just me. This is incredibly frustrating when typing emails. I even have that "intelligent" predictive service turned off and yet, it constantly seizes as if it is trying to work out what I'm saying in an email... Just let me type dammnit!
- gameswithgo 7y agovs code typing latency is on the order of 50ms. its more than necessary but not as bad as you are implying
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dep_b 7y agoVS Code is pretty good for an Electron app
- kmlx 7y agoi discovered recently that there could be some progress to be made wrt latency in editors: https://makepad.github.io/makepad/ https://makepad.github.io/makepad/ // This is Makepad, a work-in-progress livecoding IDE for 2D Design. // This application is nearly 100% Wasm running on webGL.
- wil421 7y agoI remember when I was a kid in the 90s and my dad connected two computer to play Doom. The connection was so slow it was almost impossible to play. When my brother and I saw each other’s characters walking around my mind was so blown at the time. Really a great memory. Wait, you can play the same game from 2 computers?
- C1sc0cat 7y agoI recall staying late in the office at British telecom and using our super high end oracle forms dev pcs (£4k) and 20 inch monitors(£2k) to play doom.
- pault 7y agoThe worst part was having a 200ms ping and getting constantly smoked by the guy with the sub-100ms ping. Hence the acronym LPB (low ping bastard).
- sbarre 7y agoI dunno, I actually hated the HPBs more, because at least I could rationalize getting beat by an LPB, i.e. someone with a technological advantage over me. ;-)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- john4534243 7y agoWhat is CSP ?