Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by reifiedgent 2595 days ago
NQ (NetQuake, as the original Quake is sometimes known) 'feels off' on just 10ms. Movement becomes slightly just out of sync with your input.

10-30ms is a bit optimistic, depending on how large you define a geography. Many ADSL/VDSL connections, best case, start with 5ms of latency, and often higher (say 20ms) due to interleaving. Cable tends to be around 10ms IIRC but can suffer from significant jitter which makes things worse. So for a lot of players the servers would need to be in the same city to achieve that target.
2 comments
staunch 2595 days ago
NetQuake feels excellent at < 30ms. Even higher is easy to get used to with some practice because it's extremely predictable due to a lack of CSP. And yes, the solution is to have servers within ~500 miles of players so ~20ms avg ping is the norm. Most gamers have cable not DSL connections.
link
pedrocr 2595 days ago
> 10-30ms is a bit optimistic, depending on how large you define a geography.

Just checked my fiber connection and it has 2ms of latency. google.com is 18ms away. I'm in Portugal and seem to be routed to a Google server 400+ km away in Spain. So my memory of playing on 10-20ms to local servers in Portugal is probably accurate. Covering the US or the EU with enough servers so everyone is never more than 30ms away seems feasible. Within easy reach of a startup with just ~50 VMs across different cloud provider locations and for popular games easy for users to setup regional servers themselves.

link