NetPlay Input Plugin

[RadeonUser]

Okay just ran another series of tests...
The results still confuse me :\

There's about 195ms latency between myself and Gent.
It seems that no amount of increasing lag will help the game's speed.
Curiously though, using No Sound plugin does allow the game to reach it's full speed at the default lag setting of 3.

What's perplexing me is that I can't reproduce No Sound being faster locally.
Locally the audio plugin doesn't matter, it'll still chug at ~45VI/s and only increasing lag to 6 will allow a full 60VI/s.

However, with Gent no amount of coaxing seems to help.
The only thing we noticed is that when playing around with the slider the game seems to momentarily increase in speed.

[Gent]

Well Sumerised my young padawan ; Tis indeed mildly frustrating to say the least! yet we push on

[aqwertyz]

Maybe the sound plugin only slows down Gent's Project64 but not yours. If you're using the netplay plugin and one player's emulator is slow, it will slow down everyone else's emulator as well.

[HatCat]

That's what I thought; the only way applied herein to sync with someone whose emulation speed is lower than yours is for your speed to be dragged down as well.

No Sound was actually slower than even Jabo's on my machine, so I'd bet it's device-related.

[RadeonUser]

Originally Posted by aqwertyz

Maybe the sound plugin only slows down Gent's Project64 but not yours. If you're using the netplay plugin and one player's emulator is slow, it will slow down everyone else's emulator as well.

I suppose that's likely, his main computer is currently out of commission and he's forced to be on a ~1ghz cpu for the time being.
I'm almost positive he mentioned being able to play the game at full speed without the netplay plugin but I can't be too sure about that.

I'm curious though, how are we able to play at full speed with a lag of setting of 3 with No Sound selected when we're supposed to be on a ~400ms round trip connection?
I've tested this countless times and the lowest I've seen it go is around 190ms either way.
My own local tests suggest we shouldn't be able to do that.

[HatCat]

The plugin would be faster on some systems, slower on others. Could be the cyclical speed of the new computer, could be the compatibility with various sound devices like DirectSound or the older device used by No Sound.
Heh the connection stuff though I know nothing about, unless those numbers measure ping.

[aqwertyz]

Originally Posted by RadeonUser

I'm curious though, how are we able to play at full speed with a lag of setting of 3 with No Sound selected when we're supposed to be on a ~400ms round trip connection?
I've tested this countless times and the lowest I've seen it go is around 190ms either way.
My own local tests suggest we shouldn't be able to do that.

The lag setting depends not only on the round-trip delay in the connection but also on the rate at which the game reads button-press data from the controller. Most games I've encountered read from the controller at 60 Hz. However, Mario Kart 64 only reads from the controller at 30 Hz. Here are some tables that show the relationship between lag and ping based on math and experience.

       60 Hz                     30 Hz

 Ping (ms)  |  Lag         Ping (ms)  |  Lag
------------------        ------------------
  0 -  33   |   0           0 -  67   |   0
 33 -  67   |   1          67 - 133   |   1
 67 - 100   |   2         133 - 200   |   2
100 - 133   |   3         200 - 267   |   3

Either way, it should be impossible to play a game with a lag setting of 3 over a connection with a 400ms round-trip delay. Which game are you playing?

[HatCat]

I'm confused. If the controller signal write-back frequency is twice that of a game like Mario Kart 64, that would mean half the time is spent receiving the signal, so wouldn't the ping time appropriate for a particular degree of lag be twice that of such games instead of half?

[RadeonUser]

Originally Posted by aqwertyz

Either way, it should be impossible to play a game with a lag setting of 3 over a connection with a 400ms round-trip delay. Which game are you playing?

We've only played Mario Kart 64 U exclusively.

Gent's been reconfiguring his PC a bit lately and I've been busy with some other stuff but we hope to do some more testing tomorrow.
We might even try out some other games, I just enjoy beating Gent on Mario Kart 64 so much

On another note, cheats seem to work well as long as they're set before the emulator starts to avoid sync issues.

[KayJay]

Does this work with ISS2000? It desyncs on Kaillera no matter what you try.
I even tryed it over Lan (Desktop PC to Notebook) and it desyncs. Smash Bros. 64 works flawlessly though.


So do more games sync with this method instead of only Smash64 and MK64?