John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996)

Re:John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996) by wink on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @05:53AM (#19917821)

It'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 ;)

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Re:John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996) by vardump on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @08:06AM (#19918566)

> 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.

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Re:John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996) by wink on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @10:03AM (#19919463)

Thanks 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.

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Re:John Carmack on QuakeWorld latency and business model (1996) by vardump on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @12:10PM (#19920819)

I 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.

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