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| Re: Why are Halo pings always higher? | |
| Posted By: botman <botman@planethalflife.com> | Date: 2/16/04 8:27 a.m. |
In Response To: Why are Halo pings always higher? (RunningRiot) : When I cmd.exe->ping 69.93.114.202 (HBO-COERCE), I averaged 73 ms. : In Halo, I normally average around 100~120 ms. : Why the discrepency? Is it because the netcode is so much more complex that
: I know the netcode still needs to be optimized... but... oh well. Ping time for a TCP/IP connection measures how long it takes for a packet to be sent to the host and for the return packet from the host to reach the client (ping time = total round trip time). When using a standard TCP/IP ping (ICMP echo), the host you are pinging responds right away (no delay). When pinging game servers, things are a bit different. Gaming servers typically do their "work" at periodic intervals (often times called "frame" intervals). This is analogous to clients who do their "work" before each video frame is rendered. The server usually runs at a fixed frame rate and will only respond to client requests during this work period. This frame interval is typically something like 30 times a second, 60 times a second, 100 times a second, etc. Some game servers allow the server operator to adjust this "tick rate" and some gaming servers have this rate hard coded into the server code and it can not be adjusted by the server operator. If the server is running at 60 frames per second, then it means that, on the average, it will take 1/60th of a second to respond to a client's request. 1/60th of a second is 16.6667 milliseconds. That means your "ping" time would be about 17 milliseconds if you had 0 milliseconds of delay in your actual Internet circuit. Since no one has an Internet connection that has 0 milliseconds of delay (physically impossible unless you're circuit moves electrons faster than the speed of light), you would need to add the time it takes for the server to respond to the actual delay of your Internet circuit. Let's say you can ICMP ping a host and average 80 ms. If the host's frame rate is 60 FPS, then your game ping time would be around 97ms. Now let's say the host's frame rate is 30 FPS instead of 60 FPS. 30 frames per second (1/30th of a second) is 33.333 milliseconds. So now your game ping time has gone to 113 milliseconds (80ms + 33ms). The game ping time depends on how quickly the server can respond to a client's request. The higher the frame rate for the server, the more rapidly the server can respond to clients and the lower the game ping time will be. This is true for ALL Internet game servers (not specific to Halo servers). There are many reasons why game servers have fixed frame rates (one of which is to keep from hogging all the CPU time and preventing the gaming host from doing anything else except handling client requests). There are hacks available for some types of gaming servers (Counter-Strike, QuakeIII, Unreal 2K3, etc.) that will increase the frame rate that the server is operating at, but these hacks also cause the game server to suck up all free CPU time (making it difficult to do anything else on that machine). Yahn Bernier (of Valve), did a pretty good description of ping time verses latency for game servers that might help to explain this a little better... http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?show=21 botman | |
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| Replies: |
| Why are Halo pings always higher? | RunningRiot | 2/15/04 3:00 p.m. |
| Re: Why are Halo pings always higher? | SniperMan27 | 2/15/04 4:48 p.m. |
| HBO HPC server names Here!! | RunningRiot | 2/15/04 5:04 p.m. |
| Re: Why are Halo pings always higher? | botman | 2/16/04 8:27 a.m. |
| Thanks | RunningRiot | 2/16/04 8:55 a.m. |
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