Trouble with lag.

Vogrim

My brother and I are playing Doom 2 with version 1.8.6 and it works fine except for how it handles lag. My brother is on a poor wireless connection, so whoever connects to the other person's game briefly becomes vulnerable to enemy fire when lag strikes (which is regularly). Are there some settings I can change to make the entire game freeze during lag, like with Doom Legacy?

DaniJ

Networking in Doomsday and Doom Legacy are designed around fundamentally different concepts.

Doom Legacy, like the original DOOM uses a network model which relies upon keeping all connected clients permanently in sync. This is achieved by "haulting" the game until all clients have received all information from every other connected client (i.e., a distributed peer model). The problem with this model is the performance of the game for each client is directly dependant upon the performance of the connection between the poorest performing clients (typically those furthest from each other).

Doomsday uses the client/server network model where all clients need not be completely in sync. This model removes the drawbacks of the model used in original DOOM, meaning that the performance of the network for a given client is no longer negatively affected by the performance of the other clients.

At present there is no means in Doomsday to mimic the behavior of the original DOOM network model so that other clients are "haulted" when a client connected by a poor connection drops packet receivership.

Vogrim

Are there any plans to make the original network model an option? We're trying to beat the game without saves, and it's quite hard with this handicap.

skyjake

Vogrim wrote:

Are there any plans to make the original network model an option?

There are no such plans. The original network model was designed for low-latency LANs and is fundamentally unsuited for internet play. Instead, I will strive to reduce the impact of latency in upcoming versions (from Beta7 onwards).