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Quake First Person Shooters (Games)

Quake on IPv6 68

Posted by CmdrTaco from the but-when-do-we-get-it-on-I2 dept.
Ant noted that there are now quake games running on IPv6. Now once we get it running on I2, and someone manages to bring these 2 critical technologies to my bedroom, the world will be a better place.
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Quake on IPv6 More

Quake on IPv6

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  • Taco thinks about his bedroom and his first thoughts are about broadband and a game.

    Perhaps the ladies aren't happy with his "bandwidth," if you know what I mean ;)

  • Try to bring something else than critical technologies to your bedroom Taco, you might enjoy it even more.

  • Now once we get it running on I2, and someone manages to bring these 2 critical technologies to my bedroom, the world will be a better place.

    Be more specific Taco man. You want Natalie Portman to be the genius that combines those two technologies, or at least brings them to your bedroom. :)

    --

  • I'm not impressed. Give my IPv6 FIRST, then get me the games that can support it. Don't be putting the cart before the horse people. Until the ISP's are supporting IPv6, no one is going to care about this stuff. It's a fun project sure, but it's not even being used on an up-to-date game!
  • This is a bit like people who say they can tell the difference between 75fps and 100fps - the performance gain may theoretically be there, but in reality it is not consciously detectable.

    Also, in the real world, it lag that is the killer performance hit, and that cannot be improved without breaking the laws of Einstein.

    Over a network it is effectively impossible to improve QuakeIII performance without also breaking the laws of physics. Bandwidth may make a difference, but protocols won't.

    You know exactly what to do-
    Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-

  • People that can see the difference between 75fps and 100fps are not human.
    --
  • The first three posts that I see at of above my '1' threshhold are about CmdrTaco and his bedroom activities. And all insulting. So is this a widely known fact, or just something a select few of the fastest posters know?
  • Damn, the cup's half empty!

    >but it's not even being used on an up-to-date game!

    This is probably because the full source is available for Quake1.
  • Am I the only one who doesn't care about things like this? I mean.... ?? Ultimately, this gives Quake the same ability as Doom had... to play multiplayer on local LAN's, and nothing else.

    Don't even get me started on Internet2...

  • but if it can be proven that games will work on IP6 like in said aticle, then ISPs will be more inclined to promote it and add the functionality if they know a market already exisits to support IP6.
  • Over a network it is effectively impossible to improve QuakeIII performance without also breaking the laws of physics. Bandwidth may make a difference, but protocols won't.
    Some proticals are more efficiant then others, some can be routed differently, or not at all. You can't say that a protical doesn't make a difference when it clearly does. If you are using an inneficiant protical to play a game then you are wasting many bytes in each packet, that can cause lag. A good protical will let you get the data/packet size ratio very high, and allow the packet to be routed much quicker. a protical can make a huge difference in performance depending on how it's designed.
  • One of the addresses quoted is:

    3ffe:2b00:100:107::1 (quake6.prav.unisinos.br)

    I have no clue - could someone explain what happens when I do a lookup on that hostname and get 200.132.73.102 (on my horrid little IPv4 DNS server...)

    And I just don't think hex sextuplets look as good - though they sound better :-)
  • I have seen websites slashdotted before, that's nothing new.

    But quake servers?

    I have a feeling that these servers will be highly populated for the next two days. I also have a strange feeling that there will be people on these servers with names like:

    goatse.cx,Nat_p0rtman,H0t_Gritz! etc.

    I also futher propose that these fellows will troll the servers the only way you can troll a quake server...

    Camping.

    (I feel sorry for the regular IPv6 players...)

  • Re:Quake on IPv6. So what? (Score:3)

    by Erasmus Darwin ( 183180 ) on Tuesday February 06, 2001 @09:50AM (#452314)
    Give my IPv6 FIRST, then get me the games that can support it.

    But getting you IPv6 is more likely to happen when more software supports it. And software is more likely to support it as it becomes more likely that IPv6 will be accepted. In short, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. Anything people can do try drum up support, acceptance, and publicity for IPv6 is going to help. There's no magic switch that can be flipped to make everything IPv6 overnight.

  • and its not being used in up-to-date games because it isn't useful for them. Game companies aren't going to take the time to do ipv6 games untill people actually use ipv6. But people are inclined to test out new things, and a programmer probably decided that he wanted to try ipv6 programming and decided to convert quake to use it.
    treke

  • Stop Talking, Start Doing (Score:5)

    by The-Pheon ( 65392 ) on Tuesday February 06, 2001 @09:52AM (#452316) Homepage
    Everyone is saying "We must have ipv6 before we should worry about games". The truth is that you can set yourself up with ipv6 right now! So stop talking and start doing. you can get directions here [freenet6.net].

  • ?? (Score:1)

    by macdaddy ( 38372 )
    What the hell are you talking about? Where did this come from?

    Don't mod me down just because I'm asking this schmuck a question. Thanks.

    --

  • Re:Question (Score:3)

    by zyklone ( 8959 ) on Tuesday February 06, 2001 @09:54AM (#452318) Homepage
    The ipv4 and ipv6 addresses have nothing to do with eachother. It is just a little DNS trick.

    ipv4 uses A records to specify the ip address, ipv6 uses AAAA records (for now atleast). So a host can have both an ipv4 and an ipv6 address.

    > host quake6.prav.unisinos.br
    quake6.prav.unisinos.br CNAME 2thebone.prav.unisinos.br
    2thebone.prav.unisinos.br A 200.132.73.102
    > host -t AAAA quake6.prav.unisinos.br
    quake6.prav.unisinos.br CNAME 2thebone.prav.unisinos.br
    2thebone.prav.unisinos.br AAAA 3FFE:2B00:100:107:0:0:0:1

  • Quake gaming has been on 6bone for about 2 years now. A little late on the news, eh?
  • I don't have to have ported a game to IPv6 to be unimpressed. That's the great part about opinions. As for getting it myself, I'm talking about a non-tunneled version of it. Until an ISP hands me an IPv6 addy, I'm not interested. There's no REASON for me to "do it myself" yet.

  • Re:Quake on IPv6. So what? (Score:3)

    by Brandon Hume ( 73471 ) on Tuesday February 06, 2001 @10:01AM (#452321) Homepage
    Several things:

    That version of Quake was put up by Viagenie a long time ago. I'm assuming the Slashdotters are calling it "new" just because it was added to the freenet6.net webpage with "New!" written next to it. ("New" refers to the LINK being new, not the game, or even the port!)

    Secondly, in order to port Quake to IPv6, they needed Quake source. I'm sure if they'd had access to Quake 3 source at the time, they would have used that. But most game companies don't give away the source to their current money-makers, for some odd reason.

    Third, while ISPs dragging their feet getting IPv6 to their customers IS getting annoying, you don't have to wait for them; that's what services like freenet6.net are for. There'll be lag problems due to the tunnelling, but you'll at least have something to play with.

    And as for putting the cart before the horse - no one is going to switch to IPv6 if there aren't any programs that take advantage of it. If you try to get IPv6 everywhere before anything uses it, it won't happen. Yes, IPv6 is a superior protocol. That doesn't mean anything. Its human nature (not to mention SOP at ISPs) to bailing-wire and band-aid things to the point of destruction before going through the "work" of an upgrade.

    Thankfully, I have native IPv6 access between my workstation, my machines at home, and Ca*Net3, so I'm ready to go. :)
    --
    Brandon Hume
    hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
  • The protical used by quake, and the network proticals are two very different things. It's like comparing IP/SPX to Telnet, They operate at different levels and are totally different types of proticals. The protical used inside quake really makes no difference, it end up being wrapped inside the IPv6 protical, and it's the ipv6 or tcp/ip, or ipx, or netBui type proticals that I was refering to.
  • As soon as Microsoft supports IPv6 in Windows and Internet Explorer, everything else will fall into place. Until then, most of us will just have to sigh and dream.
  • I can delegate /64's to your home or office network if you are looking to get connected to the 6Bone on your Linux/BSD/Windows boxes.

    I have dual redundant tunnels to cisco and Sprintlink via a fractional 10Mb ATM DS-3. Feel free to drop me an e-mail if you are interested. I'd be more then happy to help you get connected. (- the spam-me)

    -Pat

  • laws of Einstein

    It's a friggin' THEORY.

    And you're completely, absolutely, 100% correct, an inefficient protocol will have absolutely NO effect on lag. None at all. Zip, zero, nada. Protocol design makes no friggin' difference whatsoever.

  • Actually, it's not that difficult with larger monitors.

    More amazing are people who care about the difference between 160fps and 200fps, especially when their monitor only goes to 130fps
  • I don't have to have ported a game to IPv6 to be unimpressed. [...] Until an ISP hands me an IPv6 addy, I'm not interested.

    What part of "this is part of the process toward reaching the point where an ISP will hand you an IPv6 address" don't you understand? If you've got a legitimate reason why this isn't "news for nerds", I'm all ears. If, on the other hand, your reasoning is just "SuperRob ain't interested", then color me unimpressed. (And consider this my equally lame contribution of "Erasmus Darwin ain't interested in the fact that SuperRob ain't interested.")

  • NetBSD has had this in its package collection for a long time now, it's available at ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/pkgsrc/ga mes/quake6/README.html [netbsd.org].
  • I do beleive that IPv6 will be supported in Whistler. Maybe after that, we'll begin to see some movement.
  • They are releasing binary only.
    Where's the source?
    Maybe they'll make it available later?
  • No ISP'll implement it without demand. No demand without any software. No software without any ISP.

    IPv6 Quake offers a (partial) solution to this. If it raises the whispers for IPv6 to at least a rumbling, it'll have done amazing good for the Internet as a whole.

  • See http://www.internet2.edu/ [internet2.edu] for more information.

    Taco, actually we at universities already play quake over Internet2. Traffic between Internet2-enabled sites never touches the commodity Internet, as stated in the post to which I'm replying.
  • I do not quite understand some of the posts in this discussion. People are relating the usage of IP6 to all this work that an ISP has to do to get it running. Almost all modern ip routers support IP6, not that layer 2 routers give a fu*k anyways. I am willing to bet that your ISP already supports IP6, it's just that no one uses it.(in a broad sense)
    why does no one use it? lazyness. 32bit easier to remember then 128bit.


    teknopurge
  • /me curls up in the corner and starts to cry. I'll just go jump off a building for mispelling a word, sorry to inconvience you.
  • I mean, Jesus H Christ on a motherfucking bike, does this really constitute "news for nerds" ?
    What exactly is wrong with IPV4 for Quake ?

    If you cannot answer this, it is because there is NOTHING wrong with it.

    IPV6 is DEAD IN THE WATER.

    No less than William Gates III (who I normally diagree with vehemently) is on the record as saying 'there is no evidence of consumer demand for an IPv6 offering'

    You slashdot morons obviously have too much time on your hands.

  • Now once we get it running on I2, and someone manages to bring these 2 critical technologies to my bedroom, the world will be a better place.

    Ahh, quick porn access and violence. All the things a man needs from bed... :)

    --


  • I always though it was Dec who was queer?

    Si
  • IPv6 should be supported natively in Whistler/Windows XP. Apparently, the word is that their stack will be dual v4/v6 and has the capability to translate (not 6to4) IPv4 socket calls to IPv6.

    If you want IPv6 support in Windows 2000, you can download the TechNet Developer Preview from http://technet.microsoft.com. Microsoft Research also makes a bleeding edge stack that Microsoft uses to integrate into their Windows codebase. You can snag that at [microsoft.com]http://www.research.microsoft.com/msripv6 [microsoft.com].

    Their stack is pretty sweet, it supports IPv6 forwarding as a router, tunneling, 6to4 .. regardless of whether you are running Professional or Server. They also have rudimentary MobileIP support and a beta web based tunnel broker that interfaces with Cisco routers.

    -Pat

  • For reasonably fast networks such as a 100MB LAN, most of the latency comes from the software, i.e. the time it takes the operating system to get the data from an application and out onto the network card.

    See Tanenbaum's "Computer Networks", 3rd edition, if you are interested in learning more, its a good introduction to networking in general. From pg 562: "Rule #1, CPU speed is more important than network speed". "Long experience has shown that in nearly all networks, operating system and protocol overhead (emphasis mine) dominates actual time on the wire." He goes on to demonstrate that although the theoretical minimum delay getting a frame out onto an 802.3 is 102 microsecs, in practice, it can take up to 15 times longer than that just to get the frame out - the delay is in the software, and protocols make up a large part of the problem.

    It isn't about bandwidth. Networks are measured by two things: bandwidth and latency, or the product of these, "bandwidth latency product". For a network to perform well both of these things needs to be good, but on most current networks the bottleneck is not the bandwidth (especially for a game like Quake, where there are lots of small packets, so improving the latency improves the feel of the game more readily than bandwidth improvements.)

    Its not uncommon for a packet to be copied in memory 4 or more times from when the application sends it until it gets out onto the wire. Quake uses UDP, which sits on IP, which gets wrapped into an 802.3 frame on a LAN (after doing some arp cache checking of course), and as well as being wrapped up several times, extra copying is also involved in passing the data from the app down to the drivers (and normally within an application itself). All this crap takes time (see "Rule #4: Minimize copying"). Optimising the protocols and software can have a very noticeable effect on network performance. Windows98SE's TCP/IP stack is noticably slower than NT's (I've done some tests copying large numbers of files, typically 30 to 50 % quicker) - this is why they used NT's TCP stack in WinMe, and its also why John Carmack was itching to work on the Linux IP stack a few months ago, to try prod MS into doing something about the lousy performance of Win98's networking. "Rule #5: YOu can buy more bandwidth but not lower delay".

    The design and optimization of protocols has a big influence on network performance.

  • A LOT of quake is already on I2 (Score:3)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 ) on Tuesday February 06, 2001 @11:56AM (#452340) Homepage Journal
    Lots of internet Quake is played at universities, and traffic between Internet2 schools already passes over I2 backbones instead of the "regular" internet. For instance, anybody with a hookup to the Abilene [ucaid.edu] backbone will get great pings to my Q3F [snoot.org] server. Unfortunately, your bedroom is probably not considered an academic institution, so you might have a tough time convincing the I2 people to connect you in, IPv6 or not!
  • I sent this in last July-ish... This was on the IPv6 mailing list back then...

    Must be a slow day for slashdot...
  • Quake1 is GPL, if i remember correctly. Of course, they'll still be wanting to actually make some money off Quake3, but they'll probably open that up in a few years, when Carmack's newest creations are making Q3 look old.


  • The TechNet Developer Preview stack includes IE5.5 IPv6 support of both URLs and DNS AAAA addresses, as well as a telnet client/server and FTP client. It also includes connection diagnostic tools (ip6.exe, tracert6.exe, ping6.exe, etc.) No dreaming needed. They even have an open source web server (Fnord) available from their research web site, as well as audio conferencing and other tools. -Pat
  • I wonder if ipv6 includes a mechanism that replaces the 192.168.0.x ips used on a LAN, with one that lets these computers peer or be servers accessable by world.

    If it doesn't, how is ip6 expected to be marketed?

    Will it be side by side tunneling with ipv4 for the next 5 (10?) years before it replaces it? If so, can 192.168.x.x ips get ipv6 addresses now through freenet6?

    Will ISPs bundle out 5-10 ipv6s per subscriber?
  • whoh, completely not true. There are some protocols (like TCP/IP) that use the wire much more efficiently than others (read IPX, AppleSQUAWK). And, some route more efficiently than others. To get even more granular, the routING protocols used on the Internet could make an even bigger difference than the bandwidth, because a bad choice made by BGP or whatever could take your OC192 pipe and direct it to a quake server via some 56k line in Buttfuck, Iowa. In short, protocols make a difference.
  • There is a IPv6 feature called Site Local Addressing, where devices on an Ethernet take part of their MAC address and build their own IPv6 address so that you can communicate among your local network with no configuration necessary.

    There will be so much IPv6 address space available that is not uncommon to think that large organizations and ISPs will be allocated /64 blocks. 6to4 and tunneling technologies are currently in place to help ease the transition to IPv6.

    -Pat

  • Lag is caused by three things:

    a) Einstein (well actually maxwell's laws) i.e. speed of light delay. But this is usually quite small e.g. UK to East Coast US is about 3000km i.e. maybe 30 milliseconds delay allowing for the refractive index of fiber

    b) Hops (each machine adds a certain minimum delay, depending on the hardware/software on that host)

    c) heavy traffic (when there are lots of packets, the lengths of queues increase, and introduce delays)

    Anyway the point is that you can't do anything about a), [short of digging a straight line between the two sites(!), or moving yourselves closer together], b) you might change with extreme difficulty if at all.

    However c) is a variable delay and relates to the lack of quality of service guarantees by the network. The kicker here is that the IP6 has protocols that can give guarantees (excepting network failures once the connection is set up).

    c) is probably dominant or important in quite a lot of situations, and yes, IP6 does or atleast can help.

    Also, in a Quake scenario, any reduction in variation translates into a big help. Variable delays can make it very difficult to play. Playing Quake with what amounts to a higher priority link compared to web page downloads or ftp sessions is a godsend - it isn't as if Quake uses much bandwidth, but it is very timing sensitive.
  • The average ISP runs almost all Cisco kit - even IOS 12.1(5)T, one of the most recent ones, does not support IPv6, and most ISPs will be running earlier versions. I believe IPv6 support from Cisco (in non-beta IOS versions) will be out this year. I believe Bay and many other routers already support IPv6, but that doesn't matter for most ISPs.

    There's also a lot of planning required in how exactly the ISP should switch on IPv6 in their networks - their whole routing setup and DNS infrastructure needs extending, for a start, not to mention the various 6-to-4 conversion schemes. It's not just a matter of turning IPv6 on.

    When IPv6 is enabled, you should not have to type 128 bit addresses in any case (did you type in the address for slashdot.org, or did you use DNS).
  • Mac OS X should also include IPv6 support when it begins shipping on March 24th. If it is not in the consumer release it will be in Mac OS X Server release (due after the consumer release).
  • I don't understand why people are still using 6bone tunnels when 6to4 is easier and more efficient.
  • There is a IPv6 feature called Site Local Addressing, where devices on an Ethernet take part of their MAC address and build their own IPv6 address so that you can communicate among your local network with no configuration necessary

    the 192.168.x.x with dhcp scheme seems fine to me for site local addressing. I can understand how large organizations might need more IPs than that provides. Home and small organization networks would benefit from the choice to easily make several computers accessible from the world.

    I'm dissapointed if some space isn't made available in IPv6 for extended LAN IPs. Even if it meant having variable extended length (say addresses ending in 128-255, have an extra byte)instead of fixed 48bit length.

  • I give a fuck. (Score:3)

    by carlfish ( 7229 ) <cmiller@pastiche.org> on Tuesday February 06, 2001 @05:05PM (#452352) Homepage Journal
    "I mean, Jesus H Christ on a motherfucking bike, does this really constitute "news for nerds" ? What exactly is wrong with IPV4 for Quake ?"

    What is wrong with it is the fact that there aren't nearly enough IPv4 addresses to go around. There's an artificial scarcity of addresses that's creating an economy in selling blocks of numbers, which has to be a pretty ludicrous concept when instead we can just make sure there's more numbers than will ever be needed. There's the perpetuation of stupid systems like forcing dialup users to have dynamic addresses. Eventually we will have to switch over to something with a bigger address space. IPv6 is the only viable alternative at the moment, so the more people who are playing with it, programming with it, and generally getting their hands dirty, the smoother the switch-over will be.

    "No less than William Gates III (who I normally diagree with vehemently) is on the record as saying 'there is no evidence of consumer demand for an IPv6 offering'"

    William Gates III also said that 640k would be enough for everyone.

    Of course there's no consumer demand for an IPv6 offering. There's no consumer demand for IPv4 either. Just ask the average consumer if they want IPv4, and they'll say "huh?" There's consumer demand for The Internet, but the consumers don't know, don't care, and don't even think how their packets get from A to B. Thus, it's up to us, the people who actually make this sucker run, to do the dirty work of making sure it will still be running ten years from now.

    Charles Miller
    --

  • Please Note:
    Quake is a jello moudling game where players compete, over the internet, to mould better jello. It has absolutely nothing to do with killing people. No! Really! Honest!

    Please don't arrest that nice CmdrTaco for posting the message about it. And don't seize the computers he plays with either or all of us slashdot readers may have to find something more productive to do with our time - like, er, killing people or something [you know what those net types are like].

  • Humans can NOT see faster then 40fps. Eyes just don't work that fast.

    Movies run at 24fps, TV runs at 30fps. Your PS2 or Dreamcast will not run faster then 30fps.

    Anything over 40fps is a waste of time and money.
    --

  • They will probably have to. Right now, ISPs pay ICANN (through some intermediaries) for IPv4 addresses, so they pass those costs on to customers. I predict that IPv6 addresses will be so cheap that some ISPs will start giving their customers as many as they want, and the ISPs that try to ration v6 addresses will lose business.
  • No less than William Gates III (who I normally diagree with vehemently) is on the record as saying 'there is no evidence of consumer demand for an IPv6 offering'.

    This from the man who is eagerly awaiting a method of factoring large prime numbers, no less!

    I would assert that there is no evidence of consumer demand for 10-digit dialing either, yet here in Oregon (and a few other states) we've been forced to use it.

  • it's interesting actually that this ties in with quake and many fps (half-life springs to mind here) that quite often frame rate makes a huge difference on network lag in the game. This is quite counter-intuitive, but the reason is, is that many games poll the network between frames to update state data. Thus at 50 fps, the network is polled 50 times a second. At 25 fps the server is half as responsive
  • I'm dissapointed if some space isn't made available in IPv6 for extended LAN IPs. Even if it meant having variable extended length (say addresses ending in 128-255, have an extra byte)instead of fixed 48bit length.

    What are extended LAN IPs? I searched for that phrase on Google and come up with nothing.

    IPv6-capable machines use their MAC address to generate a link-local address. This is a perfectly valid IP, auto-assigned, but only valid for the local segment. It is assumed that this IP will be used for stateless autoconfiguration and/or DHCPv6 (which all occurs over multicast/anycast)


    --
    Brandon Hume
    hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/
  • The problem is that IOS (ie the OS that runs on Cisco routers) dosent support IPv6 in the supported (that is non-beta) releases.

    This may be a very good reason to start to wonder if Cisco is asleap at the wheel, but their boxes route pretty close to all the traffic on the net.

  • No demand for IPv6??? I demand it! The sooner the better. I would rather be rid of this IP address shortage. And I know there are people who feel the same way - I've read their comments on Slashdot.

    Next year I'll be living in a house with 4 of my friends. We'll get cable access or DSL, and I'll have to set up a Linux box to masquarade for us behind the one piddling IP (v4) address we get because there aren't that many to spare. Even after that, doing anything complicated over the Internet will be a great pain in the ass due to the masquarading.

    When IPv6 finally arrives, we should be able to get all the global IP addresses we need. That's how it's supposed to be.

  • Re:Heh (Score:2)

    by Wag ( 102501 )
    The bandwidth is useless if the content is lacking.
  • IPv6 won't come into real widespread use until a large number of machines can take advantage of it, which given the current OS marketshare means when Windows will support it. Fortunately, there is good news on that front. You can download the beta versions for NT/2000 from MS right now, but around the time Whistler is released, the STABLE release of IPv6 for all Win32 clients should be out and about... once there are lots of consumers that can take advantage of it, I think you will see many more people offering it..... of course, upgrading all those switches and routers is going to be a major PITA.
    -
    The IHA Forums [ihateapple.com]
  • Still, most women prefer "fat pipe" access...

  • Eh, I keep getting internal server error when I try the registration form. And eh, www.linux.org has it buried pretty deeply. Not a very informative link, if you ask me. Looks promising, though.

    Cheers...

  • This may be a very good reason to start to wonder if Cisco is asleap at the wheel, but their boxes route pretty close to all the traffic on the net.

    While I was working at Nortel, they claimed that 85 or 90 % of the traffic on the internet also went through one of thier products also. Remember that number can always be manipulated for the people serving them up.

  • Extended LAN IPs is just a made up phrase used as another way to describe world visible IPs throughout the LAN.

    With all the shouting about peering in the commercial world, and using the most inneficient protocol immaginable (SOAP) to tunnel into lan's, the lack of a mechanism within IPv4 to directly tunnel into a LAN (from the world) should be seen as its biggest shortcomming by more people.

  • I've done a fair amount of network programming so I'm not completely clueless here .. anyway, I've found that sometimes (depending on how the network code is structured) a higher frame rate can make the network less responsive. Games like Quake are frame-rate limited (even at 90fps, on a good PC, you'll have some idle). Limitting the frame rate implies having a bit of time left over after each frame leaves some CPU idle which (depending on the OS too) can give a quite noticeable boost to the performance on a fast network such as a 100MB LAN. If the rendering process/thread is hogging as much CPU time as it can (3d rendering tends to be very CPU intensive), processing of network packets tends to get worse. This is usually most noticeable if the network communications makes use of a seperate thread or process, but I don't think Quake is structured like that - Quake seem to work as you say, polling the network between frames. The network code I've written for our work uses a seperate thread, and limiting the frame rate does help a little. Other network systems that I've done some system integration with, which use a seperate process for network communications on WinNT, leaving some CPU idle gave a VERY noticeable boost to network performance.

    of course, very slow frame rates (like 25 fps) will again be counterproductive to the network, for games like Q3, as you say. I've found Q3 quite interesting to study, they seem to use 100% of the CPU no matter what the frame limit is - its 100% even if you limit the frame rate to 10. Presumably they continue to consume all CPU time with the game simulation and network.

  • Isn't Bill Gates the same person who told us that 640k of RAM is plenty for any computer? Keep your IPv4 and your 640k too... I'll take the hex any day on my BSD!

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