Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: Bronk on February 20, 2007, 01:57:47 PM
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We got the beginnings of a nice little discussion in my squad forum about connection speed.
ISP's advertise "faster" connection speeds. Thus some gamers translate that to mean less lag times less chance of warping. It also assumes dial up users have more lag and more chance warping.
Connection speed is different from capacity.
It's is my contention that in our little part of the gaming world. A good stable dial up connection is all that is required.
Bronk
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Originally posted by Bronk
It's is my contention that in our little part of the gaming world. A good stable dial up connection is all that is required.
Bronk
I can vouch for that. My 26.4 dialup works perfect with AH, even in the TT hordes. It's one of the reasons I love AH so much, the netcode of AH is tremendous. Hitech
ISP's can be the devil...Wildblue exploded in popularity because it offered high speed (relatively) low latency. It was the lowest latency affordable satellite service. (Around 500-600ms). You could actually play most non-fps games over it, which was unheard of in satellite world. However they overloaded their network and now I frequently see 1500-2000 (that's 1.5 to 2 SECONDS). But...my contract is almost up, and there are other offerings I can pursue.
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Originally posted by republic
I can vouch for that. My 26.4 dialup works perfect with AH, even in the TT hordes. It's one of the reasons I love AH so much, the netcode of AH is tremendous. Hitech
ISP's can be the devil...Wildblue exploded in popularity because it offered high speed (relatively) low latency. It was the lowest latency affordable satellite service. (Around 500-600ms). You could actually play most non-fps games over it, which was unheard of in satellite world. However they overloaded their network and now I frequently see 1500-2000 (that's 1.5 to 2 SECONDS). But...my contract is almost up, and there are other offerings I can pursue.
I DAM WELL SECOND THAT
:aok
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There is a slight lag imposed by a dial up modem as it converts telephone line soundwaves to data and vice versa. IIRC (this was a few years ago) my connection with the same ISP went from about 200ms with dial up to 120ms with ADSL. This is from the UK BTW.
Having said that, I completely agree that the quality and loading of the ISP's network and the route through the internet backbone are more important WRT your AH connection and bandwidth doesn't matter at all.
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Depends on the sim/game, connection, netcode ect ect ect....but a (good) dialup works just fine here. Some of the best netcode I've seen yet. :)
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Originally posted by blkmgc
Depends on the sim/game, connection, netcode ect ect ect....but a (good) dialup works just fine here. Some of the best netcode I've seen yet. :)
I'm speaking strictly AH.
Bronk
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There isn't a lot of data being bounced back and forth to the servers, so capacity isn't an issue. A stable latency of <500ms puts you in the "sweet spot," but that's not always possible for everyone in the world or in the middle of nowhere.
Your ISP only gets you so far. They contract with other providers to get you to the AT&T network where the AH servers reside. All it takes is one bad router or misconfiguration along the route to affect the stability of your connection. And, some providers along that path may force asynchronous routing on the data - it goes to the servers along one route, and returns to you along another route.
Unfortunately, you have little control over that. Your only option is to use a different provider, if one is available. Many problems are wrongly attributed to a connection problem or AH servers. Many times, the problem lies with the user's machine or router/modem:
Spyware, malware, adware, improperly configured firewalls, running two firewalls (a hardware firewall in their router plus Windows firewall activated), running anti-virus software during game play (you can't get a virus from playing AH), wrong video or sound drivers or misconfigured settings, too many services and applications running in the background, etc. can be causing more problems than the connection.
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I started AH on dialup. Had pings in the 250-300 range most of the time.
Upgraded to DSL. Pings generally less than 50 now.
A former squaddie mentioned I should see a vast improvement in my gunnery. Well, I didn't, but there wasn't the annoying 1/5th of a second of me going "hey, his wing should fall off" before it actually did.
Warps are less, others seeing me warping have disappeared afaik (although maybe thats a bad thing).
AH definitely the best game out there in terms of playability for those still on dial-up, IMO.