New feature idea

[bloom25]

I just thought of something that might be useful in AH, if it is possible for HT to do.

What I would like is if there was a way to display a particular players ping time to the server, along with your own, in the game.  This would certainly help alot.

I can understand how there might be problems with continuous pings, so I'd suggest that it be something that the server does ever 30 seconds or 1 minute.  I'd make it work like the score button on the roster.  If you select a player name it would display his ping time to the server on the last update.  (This is just like the score command.)

I realize this is not exactly a high priority thing, but it would certainly be useful.

Another idea I had was to have a way to query the server, from the webpage, to find out whether a particular player is online.  I know this would really be helpful to me to be able to know if people from my squad were online when I'm reading the bbs.  Perhaps this could be expanded to show the current number of players on the server, current host queue time, number of squaddies online, etc.

What do you guys think?  



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bloom25
-MAW-
(Formerly of the)
THUNDERBIRDS

[snafu]

Nice idea Bloom25.
 I have seen this feature on my (very) few tries at "Counter Strike". The "Gamespy" program shows Your Ping Times to the various servers before entering the game. Could be an idea on the initial arena screen (Alt v Main route). Perhap it could be added to the radio channel when anyone types a message (Or incorperated as part of a kill message). Low priority I agree and if it would place exessive load on the server forget it, but a nice idea all the same.

TTFN
snafu

[This message has been edited by snafu (edited 04-20-2001).]

[darling]

In Counterstrike they use a special remote control net code, called rcon (common to all Quake engined games), which is independent of the basic net code. This enables 3rd party developers to make tools for getting status of a server to check if the user is online or other relevant information, such as ping times. Something like this for AH would be cool. I for one would incorporate it into 332nd's home page.

Regards
Darling

[Sancho]

I'm a LPB.

[AKSeaWulfe]

Need more data than just ping times to understand the other fellas connection. Things like variance, packet loss, high/low times between packet transfers etc... Otherwise saying "You have a 400ms ping, you need to relog" is rediculous because for all you know, your 10ms ping could be recieving only 1 out of every 8 packets sent from the server.
-SW

[DRILL]

 can it be done ??  

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DRILL

[miko2d]

 Bloom, whith all due respect, your suggestion has no merit whatsoever.

 It's not the lag time (unless it's over 1 second) but consistentcy of lag that matters. There were lots of people playing WB from australia with a second ping time. I used to have 330+ ms ping time and my connections often where more stable then with 70 ms DSL connection - because of all the routers between myself and the game server.

 If you are receiving updates from the other guy 4 times a second every 0.25 seconds, his plane will move smoothly even if his/your lag is huge.
 In the other hand, if his ping time is 90 ms and once in a while his packets are delayed by 0.5 seconds, you will see him jump on your screen because you will not see his move for a while and then several packets will come together causing a warp.

 So the info you require will cause ignorant people to accuse others of connection problems even though it does not mean anything.
 A guy with fast but unstable connection will see warps, check his own connection and see that it's very fast, check the otehr and see that it's much slower and assume that it's the other guys's fault with no justification whatsoever.

 In order to determine how stable someone's connection is you have to monitor it for a while. Briefly checking someone's lag (ping) after a problem occured will not yield any info.

 Hope that helps.

 miko

[bloom25]

I was thinking of this as a kind of troubleshooting tool personally.  I find it kind of annoying to alt-tab out to start up pingplotter.

Guys, I know quite a bit about computer networks.    While I see your point as to posible problems, overall your ping time is a general indication of your connection quality.  I didn't include packet loss because it was late at night and I was tired.    It would be nice to have this info too.

Another think you guys should remember is that the ping time you would see in AH would be from the server to you, not from you to the server.  This could help very much in determining what the problem is if you develop connection issues.



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bloom25
-MAW-
(Formerly of the)
THUNDERBIRDS

[oboe]

A meaningful step in the right direction might just be a description of how to interpret the network connect status graphs that are already provided.

This is in-game, real-time info, and you can even leave it up while you fly.   But I don't know how to interpret what its telling me.