From: jaa101@gorton.anu.edu.au (James Ashton)
Newsgroups: rec.games.netrek
Subject: Re: Ghostbust detection
Date: 29 Jan 93 03:42:22 GMT
Organization: The Australian National University, Canberra
NNTP-Posting-Host: 150.203.15.124

In article <63808@mimsy.umd.edu>, leonard@mimsy.umd.edu (Leonard Dickens) writes:
>...
> The overhead on the connection imposed by such pinging would be
> minimal.  Already the server is blasting out reams of information
> every fifth of a second -- ship and torp positions, and ship status
> changes, mainly.  Adding in built in pinging would increase that rate
> by only a very small percentage.
> 
> One further advantage of autopinging would be that the lag in the line
> could be very precisely monitored through the game at either the
> server or the client end of the connection; indeed, the server might
> even include lag stats in the game summary or every so often while the
> game runs.  That might be useful for captains, especially those of
> at-large teams like mine, to detect where problems are in their line
> up.  People could be subbed out if it was determined their lag was the
> worst, or in the case of superstars like Jim Ivey*, if their lag was
> worse than is usual for them.

I agree with the above.  Lag differences make a big difference to the
relative performance of players and (in INL games) teams.  When I
occasionally play on a US server (it's handy to keep an eye on new
styles and tactics) I have at least 700ms lag and I have to let team
members know this.  I'm still good for SC bombing and base ogging and
other things but they'd better not expect me to defend planets or ogg
carriers reliably.  Adding a smoothed ping time to the player list
stats would be a big help.

Also it's sometimes difficult for two tournament teams to find a server
that provides sufficiently equal lag times.  Alternatively teams may
wish to handicap themselves.  It should be possible, at least for
tournament servers, to artificially add lag to one team or the other.
This would be by agreement before play starts.  Both captains could
send some message to themselves which the server would act on only in
the case of agreement.

If auto-pings were introduced it would even be possible for the server
to auto-equalise team average lag based on the respective smoothed ping
averages.  The code would want to limit equalisation and ignore extreme
individuals.  Care is required here if abuse is to be avoided.  The
parameters controlling the auto-equalisation feature could be variable
as above by the agreement of the team captains.

I would obviously be possible to go further and track and equalise UDP
packet loss but perhaps that would be going too far.  I think in this
area client/server changes are needed so that those few vital bits
(shield status and cloak status at least) are sent with each UDP
packet.

Well talk is cheap but code takes time.  If there is interest I'm
willing to hack into the latest server code.  Here in OZ we seem to be
surrounded by water 700ms wide so we have some incentive to run a
system like this to evaluate ourselves against the rest of the world.
______________________________________________________________________________
James Ashton						  System Administrator
					     Department of Systems Engineering
Voice +61 6 249 0681	  Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering
FAX   +61 6 249 2698				Australian National University
Email James.Ashton@syseng.anu.edu.au	 GPO Box 4 Canberra ACT 2601 Australia