Pilot Archive
Thread: Sattelite Internet=No Piloting
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KaylBreinhar
Sun May 22, 2005 5:34 pm
#14
Three-year old article describing experiences with satellite and twitch-gaming.
Response to said article
They're suggesting you should analyze your signal strength, and if it's less than 60%, get the tech to come out and alter it again.
Hold on, though - eventually WiMax will start becoming available in rural and spread-out areas, and it's gonna be a LOT faster and more reliable than satellite.
Response to said article
They're suggesting you should analyze your signal strength, and if it's less than 60%, get the tech to come out and alter it again.
Hold on, though - eventually WiMax will start becoming available in rural and spread-out areas, and it's gonna be a LOT faster and more reliable than satellite.
SpacePunk
Mon May 23, 2005 2:13 am
#15
BeakerMike wrote:
At one time I had Satellite internet back in 2002, and it's bad for gaming. My Stepfather had gotten it going with Sprint, and later on desided to move it to a house me and 2 friends where renting out from my mother. Namely they desided to give it too us so we'd have free internet when living there, and sadly it sucked for what we where doing namely gaming and heavy downloading. At the time the place was in Chandler AZ and the mini-dish had to be pointed at a group of TV Towers on one of the mountans. However right by our house we had a lovely set of power lines that I believe was part of why this Satellite Internet sucked for us.
Gaming was bad, both my Roommates and myself played games like Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat. Every now and then the game would just stop for us, I mean you'd be running on a beach then it would stop and you'd see everyone run all over, it was weird for the most part. Also I was playing Ultima Online at the time and gawd UO just didn't like the Satellite Internet, UO had my toon fighting a Dragon and out of nowhere the game wouldn't let me move or cast a spell, but I could see everything going on around me. Made PvP and PvE next to useless, anyhow it also loved going down on me and my roommates. Anytime alot of downloading was going on namely useing KaZaA (again this was back in the day.) it would die for 5 to 10 mins then come back up.
Anyhow after doing some testing we found out why the Satellite Internet sucked for us. We believed the powerlines where part of it, we also felt that when the guys from Sprint came to put the dish up they didn't have it pointed at those towers all the way. Packet Loss was the thing killing us, we had a great con, however Sprint wanted to get on a ton of 'Unknown Servers' that gave us a high Packet Loss norm was around 10 to 25% however there where times where it got up to 75% loss.
I'd call support and see what they can do.
If it was pointed at towers then it wasn't satellite internet. It was most likely a 802.11b wireless, and the power lines probably added interference to the signal. If the lines were between the antenna's then you might have experienced what's known as a Fresnel effect where the wire actually causes the beam to bend a little which would throw it off and cause a signal loss.
SpacePunk
Mon May 23, 2005 2:15 am
#16
1/2 light second on the average. Normally 450-550 ms pings at best, and that doesn't take into account latency while the signal is ground based throught the ISP and the Internet at large.
BonesDragon wrote:
Satellite is never good for any real-time gaming. Normal network latency for cable or DSL to most games is < 80ms (round trip), maybe as high as 150ms or so for dial. Because the satellite is in geosynchronous orbit, which is approximately 2/3 the distance to the moon, it is between 0.5 and 1 light seconds away (not sure of the exact number). Since your network packets have to make the round-trip twice (up to the satellite, down again, then to the game server, then the response from the server also has to go up to the satellite, and down again to you), it adds a minimum of 2 seconds round-trip travel time to your network packets. This sort of latency will always create a disparity between the displayed position and actual (server) position of your targets.
This latency isn't terribly noticable for web surfing and e-mail, or file transfer... but for anything real-time, it's a killer (this includes telephony services like VOIP, as well as gaming). The ground game isn't a twitch-shooter like space is, so it's not as bad.
General rule of thumb: Satellite == bad for gaming.
Pelamore
Mon May 23, 2005 6:15 pm
#17
You have to consider the way the game works. Game rules and hits/misses type stuff is done on the SWG servers, graphics are done locally on your machine.
So, in ground game, you shoot at Krayt, data is sent to SWG servers, hit is achieved, damage inflicted. Besides moving out of the effective range of your weapon, lag is hardly an issue.
In JTL, location is everything. You fire at Tie Fighter. Your comp draws your Blaster bolt towards the Tie. The Bolt and the Tie "Collide" according to your comp, BOOM. Problem is, the actual position data sent to SWG Servers comes back a miss, so you do no damage.
If your delay really is around 2 secs like people have suggested, you have only one option. Shoot far ahead, and watch for the Enemy Data in the top right corner to change. In your case, you will see no actual effect, no boom. Since your Blaster Bolt didn't strike the target according to your CPU and Graphics card.
Sadly, as experianced pilots will tell you, 2 secs in JTL is a lifetime. Against faster ships (Tie's) you might need to fire before it's even on your screen.
To test this out. Get a buddy to go up in there own ship. Have him fly around and you shoot at him. He can tell you how far off you are. If he is sitting still, you should be able to hit, if he's moving, you should be way off.
Also, I'm sure there are many types of Sattelite services, but the one I am familiar with uses a Phone-line for upload, and the sattelite for download. So, you are uploading at 56K at best, and downloading much much faster. That difference can also play havoc with timing.
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