0 ping?

[Dokujisan]

I realize that Nexuiz does some sort of rounding in incremenets of 50 when listing ping time, so those who are listed as 0 ping probably have something under 50 ms of ping.

What type of connection do you need to have in order to get that type of latency?
DSL?
T1?
Fiber-to-the-curb?
Do you work for an ISP?

Better question... which provider do you use?

Low pingers... please divulge your secret

btw, I'm not talking about people who host their own servers on local computers. I realize you'll get severely low ping when connecting to a server on your own network.

[:)]

Proximity.

[Dokujisan]

Well, geographic proximity is not the same as network proximity. I'd like to know how they get network proximity (fewer network hops) to these servers.

For example, I'm in a house sharing a cable connection over a wireless LAN. I've read that Cable isn't known to have low latency compared to DSL. I'll bet the wireless LAN doesn't help ping time, but I'm not sure. Perhaps certain routers are better than others with latency. I was just wondering if there was more to it that I didn't know, like people were using fiber connections or something, or if certain ISPs were known to have low latency.

Or if they use magic pixie dust.

[tChr]

the ping you see in-game is also dependen on server tics, so if a server is set to ticrate 0.03, the pings will be in multiplies of 30 ms, cause that is the time the server buffers up stuff before sending it too you.

in genereal on the same swich ping times of 0.01 and 0.02 are not uncommen. Wireless is instant latency. less than 0.20 is hard to get. (in reality that is, dont bother too hard what the decvice tells you)

[:)]

Well, geographic proximity is not the same as network proximity.

Right, I meant exactly what I said though. Geographic proximity can generally translate into network proximity on a continental scale; European players will be the ones with low pings on European servers, and Australian players will be the ones with over 300 ping everywhere.

You noticed the ping rounding in increments of 50, that is a function of the server's ticrate, so a sys_ticrate of 0.05 (the default) gives a server frame time of 0.05 seconds, which is the ping measurement interval and does not produce precise results. Servers with higher rates will give more precision, for example sys_ticrate of 0.03 would give increments of 30ms in ping measurements. No one playing online has a ping of 0ms, the speed of light is stupid like that.

As for low-latency ISP's, the lowest ping would probably come from playing from a University of business connection, I played from my university's sweet sweet OC3, Internet2 connected connection last year and had magical pings. Next comes consumer fibre connections and T-1, although I think those are rare among Nexuiz players. I've heard DSL gives lower latency than cable internet, but I have no information on that. The worst ISP's to have for gaming are dial-up, satellite, and any other wireless technology.

Wireless LAN can hurt your ping time because the possibility for signal interference is higher than with a wire, since everything wireless seems to run around the 2.4 GHz frequency. Make sure you change the broadcasting channel on the router from the default, and make it unique from any other neighboring signals. This should help your ping a bit.

[esteel]

Well yeah the most important thing is proximity and Dave is right geographic proximity is at least a good indication of network proximity. I have had quite some luck with my internet connection. There are lots Nexuiz servers in germany, and i think at least 2 are in the same town as i am and i'm kinda hooked up into the university network so i'm quite happy with my ping on european servers.

[BlueberryYumyum]

i'm getting a 0 ping on most german servers due to my 10 mbit lan cable connection (also university network).

[mkzelda]

You will suffer greatly from your wireless. I find it adds 40ms of latency for me than using the same ISP connection via ethernet.

Geographic proximity really is a rough estimate. I've spent a lot of time moving lots of large files between servers in countries all over the world and routing does interesting things. I could send files from a server in NC, US to .de/.nl/.se/.no/.fi/.uk and the other countries on the fiber ring at 5MB/s, but files coming back across the pond to the US only went 2MB/s. I observed that the routing would change sometimes depending on which direction the data was traveling or what time of day. Whenever I'd move files from the same NC, US location to Asia, the files would would be routed east, across EU to Asia and only go about 200KB/s. However, files coming back from Asia to the US would go east again, across the pacific to LosAngeles L3 and a direct hop across the US to NC resulting in 2-3MB/s transfers.

The US is dragging behind the world in internet speed/capacity and thats just largely due to the fact that the US is so large and sparce. Proximity to the metropolitan areas is crucial. NY, DC, Charlotte, Atlanta, Chicago, Texas, Phoenix, L.A., San Fran, San Diego, Portland, & Seattle are some of the important places. You'll find more EU players have better pings than US players, b/c their governments and EU commissions have funded better backbones. This was largely possible b/c the countries are smaller, and the cities are more densly populated. Europe doesnt have the dispersion the US has. Iirc, Germany even has laws stagnating the possibility of developing outskirts.

So, Doku, to answer you directly, I don't think you can do too much more than stop using wireless if you can. In TN I'm guessing your only choices are Charter Cable and Bellsouth/AT&T DSL. Those are both equally unspectacular choices. I tend to prefer cable over DSL, except when Charter is involved. Charter has the capacity to be good, but in practice it seems to be the most unreliable. Also, having a mental deficiency seems to be a hiring requirement for them. I hated every minute I've dealt with them.

Fortunately though, I moved away from the TN/NC mountains and Time Warner Cable (RoadRunner) has been very good to me in the Raleigh, NC area. In 7 years I've never had it go out (other than power failures but my UPS wont run forever anyhow), I've never seen my performance suffer. I can always max out my connection to my cap and I tend to have a good ping to east coast servers. I get 20-40 for the most part at the GA ladder and 20-80 at NY.

[Silence]

I'm from spain and i have a 5 Mb/s (4964 kbs up, 263kbs down) with Telefonica. It's the normal connection here. But anyway, i have a ping of 100 average on every server I have a spanish server on my list with a ping of 49, and the next one is outside spain and has 79. My average ping on CSS is 30....

[Urmel]

What's so bad about a ping round 100 on Nexuiz servers? It's not the most reasonable thing to compare CSS and Nexuiz. Not talking about the dependance of the shown ping and the variable ticrate set on the servers.

Look at some of our best players' ping (like kojn or dIM), they win anyway. I guess it even gives them an advantage...