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Trouble Shooting / Re: Bandwidth
« on: May 31, 2021, 01:00:02 PM »With wireless the primary cause of jitter is co-channel interference on the WiFi link. Your kids video streams compete for the right to transmit and receive. The contention can cause dropped frames and lag of real-time streams like the Q2 protocol. The same thing applies to the radio channel connecting your tether device to the WAN, LTE, 5G etc., all suffer from the same problem. Geography also matters. Larger cells suffer from more traffic and contention. Your gaming life will suck for a while but it won't be because of texture detail.
Yeah, I thought that seemed kinda whacked about textures and bandwidth. I think losing the gun model, footsteps, and even gibs (q2pro) saves a bit but at 20 kbps t'aint gonna matter. My connection's been okay, faster than my wired one in fact, but there are moments or hiccups every so often. The problem is after 15 gb of data, they kick it down to 2 Mbps till the next cycle. Anyhow, t'will just be me on this tether, kids are gone now (for now) - guess I am dating myself here...heehee. And if it doesn't suck so bad I may just stay wireless after summer is over. Again, thanks for the replies.
Cheers,
That 20kbps is only the server-client protocol needed for tracking the player movement and actions. Those are the frames that the server sends to tell the client what's happening inside the map and for the client to send your player movement, line of sight and shots. Graphic objects, maps and sounds are not sent except at client connect or intermissions. Those downloads can be from the server or from the http redirect servers. They consume more bandwidth and go much faster than 20kbps (That's 20 kilobits per second, not bytes) Quake 2 protocol was very economical because it was invented when modems were the dominant life-form on the planet.
The client is presenting you with a view of the map based on your client information and a bunch of numbers from the server. The server communicates the positions and movements of the other players but there is no concern about content like sounds and graphics, those are all computed internally in your client. The view you see and hear all comes from the client code and the maps and models on your disk, nothing like that flows between client and server while the game is played.
20kbps is an average rate, assuming you already have all the entities, maps, skins and sounds on your client. If you are already an established player then downloads will be rare and your gaming bandwidth consumption will be minimal. At an average of 20kbps it will take you 7,500,000 seconds to transfer 15GB of data (1.5x10^11 bits of data / 20,000 bits per second). That's 2083 hours of playing.
If you're hitting the 15GB limit it's not from playing Quake 2. 