FPS Network-Tests
2017-11-07

Here again another little blog post. I have done a small network test and would like to tell you about it. You can watch a part of the match on Vimeo.

FPS ran on two different laptop connected via WLAN. The left stream shows the server and on the other side the client. On average, the server measured a round-trip time of 28 ms and the size of the snapshot averaged 224 bytes.

In general, both players have described the gaming experience as acceptable. However, there were, as expected, occasional annoying delays with the non-local client (The effect can be seen quite well in the video at 0:05 to 0:09). This effect correlates with a lot of lost packets on server and client side, for me the error fits the observations in the log and was the only thing that affected the gaming experience (except for the lack of game content 😂).

Besides from this, I have familiarized myself with the linux command tc. With whom you can easily simulate an increased latency or packet loss - yay linux 😂. This will probably simplify the development in the next few days and weeks.

But how do I continue now? As a goal, I would like to target fluid gameplay in the local network. I guess client-side prediction would be the best starting point to smooth out the experienced lags. After that I definitely need to test again. Apart from that, I think that without compression the network-protocol will hit quite quickly the limit, so that’s why compression is also on top of the list. But one step at a time 😊.