IWuvGeno
Smash Apprentice
This is a post I made on AllisBrawl and thought placing it here would be helpful as well:
I've seen a post either here or on SWF dealing with this issue, but there are still many people who are unclear about the majority of these issues. I'll try to answer these matters based on how often I hear them.
My friend is only 1 to 2 hours away. Why am I lagging?
As a note, this isn't the most scientific measurement of distance, but most people use it. Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) needs to route a connection between you and your friend. This routing requires what is called 'server hops' - or, your connection will take a certain number of stops along the way (think of it like a multi-stop flight). This can make your latency ridiculously high if the server hop count is high, even over the same distance as someone who doesn't get a lot of hops. Generally, when people use two different ISP's, it will make more hops. Certain ISP's are worse than others and may make worse routes, resulting in horrendous lag.
I get no lag when playing people across the country!
Since your latency (response time) degrades greatly over distance, this is simply impossible with current technology. The more distance you and your opponent have between you, the higher your latency (or lag) will be. It might still be playable by your standards, no one is arguing that. Casual games can be played in fairly laggy conditions. From my research, you get about 5ms delay per 100 miles on a decent route. I'll explain how this is important later.
My connection is super fast!
First, I'll dispel the myth of 'super fast' connections. With any connection there are two main factors: Latency and Bandwidth. Bandwidth is how much data you can transfer and is barely important in playing online games. As long as you don't download while playing and get more than 5k uploading and downloading, you're golden. Latency, on the other hand, is determined by server hops and the quality of material used by your network. Some ISP's are worse than others, but most broadband services are around the same quality. AT&T's DSL service is the only bad one in my area, and if you game, avoid this ISP like the plague.
Why don't I lag as badly on other games?
Most internet games use certain tactics to reduce the necessity of super low latency (called prediction), unlike Super Smash Bros Brawl. As you play a game, if you've ever noticed a player suddenly teleporting backwards (rubber banding) or stopping and then speeding way up, you've noticed the results of prediction code. This type of coding wouldn't work for a game like SMBB, as these types of things would be far too frustrating to play with and competitive play would be utter garbage. SMBB plays the game at the speed of your latency. Why you lag has little or nothing to do with Nintendo, and everything to do with the current state of the internet. You can certainly get some great games going, as long as you apply the information I've supplied here.
Getting the USB LAN adapter reduces latency.
This is actually a myth. Unless you have a lot of other appliances using the same frequency or your Wii is really far away from your wireless router, your ping won't be effected. Although, you will get slightly less packet loss using the adapter.
The 'Servers' are running horribly today!
Also a myth. I'm sure on a very very rare occasion, this might happen. However, since this service sets up a direct connection between you and your opponent, almost ALL latency issues arise because of networking issues.
What is the ideal latency for a game of SMBB?
To play Brawl competitively, you'd want the game to run flawlessly. In order to run the game flawlessly, you need to get a latency of 17ms or less. 1 MS (1 Millisecond), is 1/1000th of a second. 17 milliseconds is 17/1000ths of a second. If you divide 1000 by 17 you get a number close to 60, which would be indicative of how many frames per second the game would run at. Since the game naturally runs at 60 frames per second, you wouldn't want it to run any slower than this in a competitive environment. 30ms, though it sounds really fast, is almost half this speed (or 33 frames per second) !
-To play competitively, I would suggest no more than 20ms of delay.
-To play semi-competitively, I would suggest playing at no more than 30ms.
Every connection gets about 10ms of delay regardless of how far away the opponent is. With my figures of 5ms per 100 miles, that would indicate that you'd never want to play anyone more than 200 miles away for a competitive game and 400 miles away for a semi-competitive game.
EDIT: If you're like me, and you want the game to run great every time, get a program that can ping IP's and exchange IP's using http://whatsmyip.org/
I'll end this here. Hope this helps some of you, and I can finally link people this and save myself time explaining.
I've seen a post either here or on SWF dealing with this issue, but there are still many people who are unclear about the majority of these issues. I'll try to answer these matters based on how often I hear them.
My friend is only 1 to 2 hours away. Why am I lagging?
As a note, this isn't the most scientific measurement of distance, but most people use it. Your ISP (Internet Service Provider) needs to route a connection between you and your friend. This routing requires what is called 'server hops' - or, your connection will take a certain number of stops along the way (think of it like a multi-stop flight). This can make your latency ridiculously high if the server hop count is high, even over the same distance as someone who doesn't get a lot of hops. Generally, when people use two different ISP's, it will make more hops. Certain ISP's are worse than others and may make worse routes, resulting in horrendous lag.
I get no lag when playing people across the country!
Since your latency (response time) degrades greatly over distance, this is simply impossible with current technology. The more distance you and your opponent have between you, the higher your latency (or lag) will be. It might still be playable by your standards, no one is arguing that. Casual games can be played in fairly laggy conditions. From my research, you get about 5ms delay per 100 miles on a decent route. I'll explain how this is important later.
My connection is super fast!
First, I'll dispel the myth of 'super fast' connections. With any connection there are two main factors: Latency and Bandwidth. Bandwidth is how much data you can transfer and is barely important in playing online games. As long as you don't download while playing and get more than 5k uploading and downloading, you're golden. Latency, on the other hand, is determined by server hops and the quality of material used by your network. Some ISP's are worse than others, but most broadband services are around the same quality. AT&T's DSL service is the only bad one in my area, and if you game, avoid this ISP like the plague.
Why don't I lag as badly on other games?
Most internet games use certain tactics to reduce the necessity of super low latency (called prediction), unlike Super Smash Bros Brawl. As you play a game, if you've ever noticed a player suddenly teleporting backwards (rubber banding) or stopping and then speeding way up, you've noticed the results of prediction code. This type of coding wouldn't work for a game like SMBB, as these types of things would be far too frustrating to play with and competitive play would be utter garbage. SMBB plays the game at the speed of your latency. Why you lag has little or nothing to do with Nintendo, and everything to do with the current state of the internet. You can certainly get some great games going, as long as you apply the information I've supplied here.
Getting the USB LAN adapter reduces latency.
This is actually a myth. Unless you have a lot of other appliances using the same frequency or your Wii is really far away from your wireless router, your ping won't be effected. Although, you will get slightly less packet loss using the adapter.
The 'Servers' are running horribly today!
Also a myth. I'm sure on a very very rare occasion, this might happen. However, since this service sets up a direct connection between you and your opponent, almost ALL latency issues arise because of networking issues.
What is the ideal latency for a game of SMBB?
To play Brawl competitively, you'd want the game to run flawlessly. In order to run the game flawlessly, you need to get a latency of 17ms or less. 1 MS (1 Millisecond), is 1/1000th of a second. 17 milliseconds is 17/1000ths of a second. If you divide 1000 by 17 you get a number close to 60, which would be indicative of how many frames per second the game would run at. Since the game naturally runs at 60 frames per second, you wouldn't want it to run any slower than this in a competitive environment. 30ms, though it sounds really fast, is almost half this speed (or 33 frames per second) !
-To play competitively, I would suggest no more than 20ms of delay.
-To play semi-competitively, I would suggest playing at no more than 30ms.
Every connection gets about 10ms of delay regardless of how far away the opponent is. With my figures of 5ms per 100 miles, that would indicate that you'd never want to play anyone more than 200 miles away for a competitive game and 400 miles away for a semi-competitive game.
EDIT: If you're like me, and you want the game to run great every time, get a program that can ping IP's and exchange IP's using http://whatsmyip.org/
I'll end this here. Hope this helps some of you, and I can finally link people this and save myself time explaining.