"over the net" means LAN or Internet?

Internet

What is your latency if you ping your friend's IP address or vice versa?

Real LANs (and even dialup connections) have extremely low latency, and many LAN/modem games weren't designed to handle the latency of playing over the Internet.

I have a fairly high ping, between 200 - 250ms because I'm in the states, and my friend is in the uk. I'm aware of the LAN issue, it just seems strange that it is mostly bullfrog games that have lag problems, which is why I mentioned netbios. Descent, for example, does not use netbios and was running incredibly smoothly.

Netbios produces some overhead because it is a safe transport layer.

Just to chip in to this one, the games drop to about 1 frame a second the moment the 2nd person joins the game. Out of curiosity i tried to host a game with the 2nd machine on my LAN connected via wireless, things did improve but with the ping at around 7ms nut it was still choppy though.

Now the weird thing is, I have a vague memory of playing Dungeon Keeper over the internet via the old Kali service. This was back before I had high speed internet so pings would have been around 150 > 200 ms.

Maybe try fixed cycles, last time I tried Magic Carpet and Hioctane it worked quite nice.

Bullfrog games probably have the same network support mechanism; anyway I'll be talking about Dungeon Keeper.

In DK, the game makes 20 "game turns" in every second. On EVERY turn, a packet containing user's actions is prepared. Until the packet for specific turn is received, the game waits..

So - to make the game work at acceptable speed, you'd need ping = 1000/20 = 50. Any higher value makes the game unplayable.

I tried with Magic Carpet with a friend based locally, ping was sub 30ms.

Exactly the same symptoms. As Mefistotelis said, Bullfrog most likely used the same IPX library though all their games. Shame it was so unforgiving.

Tried another game with Rav, Carmageddon that works flawlessly. So looks like Bullfrog is out of the multiplayer rotation.

Is it ipxnet that is used for multilayer? Would it be possible to implement a .bz2 compression or some other compression algorithm to reduce the size of the information being transported? So, games meant for LAN play could be more easily played over the Internet?

Dr. Sassafras

No.

As I already mentioned, the problem is not in size of the packet (which is, in DK, 17 bytes + network layers data), but in amount of packets that are sent every second.

DK sends 20 packets every second, and every time one is sent, the game waits (which means STOPS) until similar packet is received from the other side.

The only way to change/fix that is to make large modifications in game code.

Thanks for the explanation. Who wants to petition EA to release the code; its one of my favorite games!

(that is a joke for those of you who are wondering)