Armada Help!

[Unregistered]

Hey guys,

My brother and I have been trying to get armada working over the net. On our individual machines no warries, it all works fine. The minute we try to play together we run into connection issues, or if we get into the game HUGE lag issues, making the game to choppy to play. Tried increasing the cycles in dosbox, playing with the frame skip, but nothing fixes it.

The question is does anyone have any ideas how we can improve our net lag? Using dosbox .63, we ping each other with ipxnet ping and get anywhere from 340ms to 960ms. Sometimes it doesnt even register a ping. Im using a laptop with 3ghtz, and 8mb connection in the uk. My bro is on a 64bit amd, 1mb connection in Australia.

Thanx

 

[ChrisReid]

The question is does anyone have any ideas how we can improve our net lag? Using dosbox .63, we ping each other with ipxnet ping and get anywhere from 340ms to 960ms. Sometimes it doesnt even register a ping. Im using a laptop with 3ghtz, and 8mb connection in the uk. My bro is on a 64bit amd, 1mb connection in Australia.

The bandwidth doesn't matter (or rather, your downstream doesn't.. your upstream is the potential bottleneck), since Armada was designed to run on 2400 baud modems. You both have plenty fast computers, and increasing the cycles won't help. I would suggest matching the same cycle and frameskip value on both computers. I use around 6500 cycles and 0 to 1 frameskip when I play.

The problem is that you're about as far away as physically possible there. Ideally you're really looking for pings in the <100 ms range. I think 340 would be playable too, but when you're spiking up to almost a full second, then it's going to be terrible. I don't really know what to tell you. Bringing down ping times is something everyone who plays multiplayer games online is universally striving for. Armada continuously transfers data between the players, so this will be an issue throughout the game. It was designed to work between computers on a local network or directly connected via cable or phone line. Different routers/modems/network cards may have a very marginal impact on pings. Different ISPs might also have better routes between points, but it'll come down to the technology you're using not being able to consistently transfer data around the globe reliably in less than 1/10th of a second.

 

[Unregistered]

Cool, thanx for the input. Pretty much what I thought, just hoped maybe someone would say otherwise. Doh!! Have to wait till im back home in Aus I guess.