Hows Internet Gaming work so quick

clubb699

clubb699

clubb699

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18 Oct 2011
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668
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Near Brummie land
Hi all,

Well this is a kinda strange question but its doing my head in lol, but how on earth do they manage to make say battlefield 3 online work in real time so quick, i mean someone can be in UK and america along with 62 other players and we all see the same thing instant.

How do they manage to process all the details so quickly? do they only have to send certain data etc come on plz i need help with this one ;)


Happy new year lads

Clubb699
 
It only takes about 85 milliseconds for the data to get across the Atlantic.

However for 64 players you need a decent amount of upload speed, where as most home connections only have good download speed.
 
Its not as real time as it looks - there is atleast 70ms latency between someone in the US and UK - probably more like 120-150ms.

The way it works is via whats called client side prediction where your copy of the game running on your PC takes the data thats coming in and tries to "guess" ahead a little - generally using things like dead reckoning its possible to fairly accurately build a real time picture of whats going on but sometimes it gets it wrong which is why you have "registry" issue where things don't quite happen right i.e. bullets fail to hit the player your shooting at.

The time it takes data to get to the US and back is very slight tho around 1/10th of a second so most people won't notice the delay at all.


EDIT: Source/HL and quake/doom based game engines usually have console commands to allow you to turn off prediction - typically something like cl_predict* - disabling those will show you what its really like :D not very playable at all.
 
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Rroff said:
The way it works is via whats called client side prediction where your copy of the game running on your PC.
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Yeah and this leads to the two most annoying things about online FPS. Rubber-banding and shooting somebody first but then dying as the server updates the client informing it the other guy got there first. :mad:
 
I'm an IT engineer, and I can confirm that it is indeed magic.....now I'd better get back to catching the magic smoke that just came out of this router....
 
It travels at the speed of light in a solid at the moment, I have heard about fibre with a vacuum inside being available soon but imagine the extra annoyance when that breaks and having to suck out all the air again.
 
Arnie said:
Travels at the speed of sound innit.
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since when did the internet work by people shouting down megaphones?

the data travels from hub to hub at light speed. the clue is in the name: fibreoptic, as in optical, light. im not so sure where the electrical cable stops, and the fibre starts, but i would have thought the majority of the distance would be using the fibre

i'm happy to be proven wrong here, but i suspect a large amount of the delay is the routers processing where each packet of information need to go along its journey
 
Reaper 392 said:
since when did the internet work by people shouting down megaphones?

the data travels from hub to hub at light speed. the clue is in the name: fibreoptic, as in optical, light. im not so sure where the electrical cable stops, and the fibre starts, but i would have thought the majority of the distance would be using the fibre

i'm happy to be proven wrong here, but i suspect a large amount of the delay is the routers processing where each packet of information need to go along its journey
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hes on dialup init, when he connects to the internet he hears the "sound"

just incase you werent with us in the dialup era


might make the dialup sound my ringtone for the lulz , every modem i had sounded slightly different aswell
 
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