Kali Drivers!!!
I was talking to Jay Cotton the other day about network latencies
and he told me some good things about network latencies and thier
causes. I asked him and he told me I could share this with
all of the KALI and RAS people..
Don Wilshe, IVGA
http:\\www.ivga.com
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Notes on Kali performance...
The performance of Kali is determined (almost) solely by the connection
between players. The speed and location of the server has no affect
except for one or two games (EF2000 and Top Gun). Kali routes all
packets directly between the players so the server is only needed to
tell each node where to send data. Even so, connecting to a server at
your own ISP or closer to you might increase your possibility to find a
fast game if other players use the same logic in choosing a server.
People closer together will tend to end up on the same servers.
The best way to improve game speed is to increase the connection speed
for each player and bring players closer together. ISPs that run modems
with DTE speeds of 115000 bps will run very well with Kali. ISPs that
only run their modems at 38400 or 57600 will not see the same speeds.
It's also essential for the ISP to have plenty of bandwidth available
when you actually play the game. If you play games during peak hours
your ISP might not have purchased a fast enough connectino to handle all
of their users.
In fact almost all ISPs have more customers than modems, have more
modems than the have bandwidth available, and even the major internet
backbones (MCI, and SpringNet) have sold more bandwidth to the ISPs than
they have available. We're all fighting for bandwidth out there. The
customer that oay more for better connections and the ISPs that pay more
for better
connections will win.
Of course the same thing applies to the clients. Using a 16550 uart and
running the connection at 115200 with a high quality modem makes a big
difference. Faster PCs can make a difference since many of the games
require a lot of CPU even without having to deal with packets for up to
7 other players. Users with slower PCs (486 or slower) will need to
take steps to reduce the CPU usage. Removing music drivers from the
games and reducing screen resolution or size will usually help quite a
lot on those PCs. Memory is also important especially in Win95. Having
16 megs of RAM is highly recommended.
Thanks,
Jay
To clarify this, for each N2 race on Kali/Kahn, there is a Kali/Kahn
"server" (what Jay is referring to above) and a N2 race server (the
user who selected "answer" instead of "dial.)
The connection latency of the N2 server IS EXTREMELY important to the
game playability. Whoever's got the best connection to the 'net should
be the answerer for a race over kali/kahn...
Remember, as always, real IPX is supported, and if Kali/Kahn work for
you, it's a bonus...
---Jim Sokoloff, Papyrus
Any possibility of TCP/IP support in the future? It's surprising this wasn't
considered, since the Internet is the primary medium for connections now.
IPX is better for games, but requires Kali on the Internet.
*** on the Internet seems to be the way things are going. I only hope
that we get the latency rates to keep up with the *** demand.
The other note to this, is on the NRO servers, the latency will be between
the NRO server and the players. This is different then multiplayer N2 on Kali,
where speed from the 'answering' player to each racer determines latency
<confused yet? :)>, and the server plays little part.
Richard
