Gaming on a modem

Credentials first. My first games were on a serial cable. Then ethernet LAN. Then college superJanet connection. And then, the terrible truth, a 56k modem. Finally finding a good 0845 ISP. The realisation, NTL cable.

Secondly my sources. A whole list of pages worth looking at. They'll appear in the text, but I've collected them here for conveniance.

• Lowtax talks about powerplay [Details] [Details]
• Slightly more reverant, planetfortress does the same [Details]
• Eurogamer, ditto [Details]
• Some info about the upcoming V92 standard [Details]
• And an interesting map [Details]

Broadband is not universal

Unpleasant facts time. Not everyone has access to a 'better' connection than a modem. And nor will they have for a long time to come. This map should give you some idea. The red dots indicate telephone exchanges. The green dots indicate the ones that offer DSL. Ok, the population of the US isn't uniform, most people live quite near to one of those dots - but as you can see, most of the dots aren't green...

A similar situation exists in other countries, and with other similar technologies (such as cable)

Some things require broadband

Television, for example. Radio, downloading huge files.

But most things do not.

That includes most games.

I don't know how to stress this enough. But, at least in theory, your average fps needs to send very little data. Ten times a second, it needs to tell you the location, speed and acceleration of every object you can see - and perhaps someting special about each of them (they hanged animation cycle, or died, or whatever) - and you need to tell the game the same about yourself.

That adds up to a grand total of about six hundred bytes a second, when most modems, even on a bad line, can manage about three thousand bytes a second.

But my ping is terrible!

Well - that's more of a problem. Latency does need to be low for an action game to play realistically. But, there are things which can be done to counter this.

One of these things is powerplay. Click the links at the top to find out about it, and take lowtax' one a bit more seriously when you realise that nothing has been said about it for almost a year (beyond a single derogatory addition on the planetfortress link)

The official site has no information, not even if you give it your email address - and the 'now finished' specification isn't public.

{Interesting side fact - the url 'powerplay.com' - was owned and used by cisco, but is currently unavailable...}

Other things are client side prediction (which despite everyone ranting about the 'new netcode' is about a billion times better for those on high latency connections.) getting a better ISP and tweaking your machine.

But with most game developers not wanting to spend the time to write their own better netcode, and there not being many 'standard packages' out there for them to use - and of course the overwhelming 'everyone has broadband now, right?' asusmption - it looks like most games are going to be written badly in the future...

Where does this leave us? With a new modem standard - which doesn't actually add any speed, but does add some nice "call waiting doesn't kill your game" features - which might be nice once the phone tools software picks up a bit.

Conclusion

Well - it's possible in theory, but in practice it looks like the world is ignoring modems, despite their being standard...

Daft? You betcha.

Um, all the links are at the top, unless you want to discuss it, comment directly to me or read more of my site