Homepage: SuRgEoN's Quake1 Goodies http://users2.50megs.com/surgeon/quake/quakeworld/
Date: 24-AUG-00
I was missing some kind of ping analyzer to find optimal
pushlatency setting (movement prediction) on quakeworld
servers, so i wrote panalyzer, a small cli tool that can
read up to 60 floats from commandline, seperated by spaces.
The prog then finds the median and stores highest and lowest
value as range. Output: median [low-high]. The accompanying
scripts use qstat to generate pings, stores the values in
env variables and feeds them to panalyzer.
All you have to do is move PAnalyzer dir where you want it
and doubleclick the PAnalyzer icon. You will be prompted
with a string requester asking for the server, followed by
an interval requester (1-3 are suitable values).
The script will update the calculation for every 5 pings.
the median and range becomes reliable after the first 4
updates (panalyzer uses the past 20 pings for calculations).
Pushlatency determines how far ahead in time your quakeworld
client should predict player and object movement. It is
extremely important to set an ideal pushlatency in order to
minimize the effect of delay between you and the server.
Pushlatency should be set to the negative value of a position
somewhere between lower limit and median. If median is close
to lower limit, a suitable value would be the negative value
of the lower limit. If median is close to the center of the
range, it would make sense to choose a value equal to the
negative value of the median. Generally, pushlatency should
not exceed -250, because the quakeworld prediction will have
more errors, the further ahead it has to guess. A wrong guess
manifests as a sudden position-jump. You may miss a shot by
a large margin or run into an obstancle you thought you had
passed, because the server sends an update which differs
significantly from the prediction.
Example1: 44 [36-1044] would translate to a pushlatency of -36.
However such a large range indicates an unstable connection
and you can expect occasional lockups with delay up to 1 second.
Example2: 92 [65-130]. Ideal connection with narrow range.
Pushlatency shoud be set to -90.
Example3: 166 [110-223]. This is a good connection with a
relatively narrow range. Pushlatency should be set to -160.
Example4: 285 [250-401]. Relatively good reliability.
A reasonable pushlatency value would be 200-250, depending
on your willingness to accept above mentioned position-jumps.
Tips when searching for good servers:
Narrow range, low median: very enjoyable, stable connection
Narrow range, high median: enjoyable, stable connection.
Wide range, median close to lower limit: mostly enjoyable, occasional lag.
Wide range, median close to middle: not enjoyable, unstable connection.
Have fun with this little tool!
-SuRgEoN
history:
v0.2:
Rewrote panalyzer to take a parameter -f for float output
and -i for integer output and up to 60 vaues. Now finds
median instead of mean. Data from pinging was generally not
normal-distributed, so mean could be far off, resulting in
too high estimates for pushlatency.
Changed calculation update interval from 1 to 5.
Added the info for using panalyzer as pushlatency guide.
v0.1 First release
future: make panalyser part of GameTracker, so that pushlatency
can be set automatically, ahead of connecting.
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