3 ms·
The article says (paraphrase) that > On some connections one in five packets are dropped And then shortly afterwards that > This would only fail if two conse
by jamesaguilar 13y ago
The article says (paraphrase) that
> On some connections one in five packets are dropped
And then shortly afterwards that
> This would only fail if two consecutive packets were dropped, and this seemed unlikely.
Hrm. I think I'm beginning to see the problem here, and it isn't the internet. Still, fun to read about the battle scars of remote gaming's early days.
- neilk 13y agoThat part made no sense to me either. I think their requirements were to transmit every action the other player(s) took, so it seems like things would still be failing all over the place. But maybe occasionally insane results are better than occasionally blocked.
- forrestthewoods 13y agoThese guys were at the forefront of online game technology back in '97. And not only that but they were also willing to share what they learned. Mistakes, warts, and all. There's something magical about the internet where any technical post results in a slew of commenters trying to show they are smarter than the topic author. Good job.
- GauntletWizard 13y agoYou've destroyed an important bit of information in your paraphrasing. The literal quote: > It turned out that on some connections, about every fifth packet we sent would just disappear into the Ethernet. Due to the way packet-queueing works, it is actually a reasonable failure-expectation. If the network is on the edge of congestion, a packet will be dropped as there's no space in the queue, but another packet will be sent and clear space in the queue before a second packet has a chance to be lost. In many near-congestion failure modes, it is literally every fifth or tenth or twentieth packet that gets dropped. This is actually the basis of how TCP's congestion-control works, too.