connecting online

[mag]

I have a question about connecting to play mutiplayer, because I'm bored of playing instant action and campaigns. I have a sat. broadband connection, which has a lag because of the time it takes the signal to travel. I always figured it would be a problem trying to play online because of the delay. is this something I have to deal with or is it not a problem. I would like to play against a real player. thank's for your input.

[Zero Angel]

It will be laggy, because satellite connections tend to have higher pings than land line connections. 2-way satellite (which does not use dialup for upload) is a little less laggy. Theres only one way to find out for sure though, and thats to join some games. If the ping is under 300 then its good enough that it wont be very laggy.

[mrtwosheds]

Some of our community will not mind your lag too much, others will throw you out of their games faster than your /pinglist will give you a response...Don't feel put out by this and respect their desire to have lag free games.
Start your own games and blame everyone else. 

[Zero Angel]

And if they do, then you can do what 2 sheds suggested while listening to this song: (warning! profanity!)

http://www.bzuniverse.com/~zeroangel/misc_files/laggy_bastard.mp3

[General BlackDragon]

satalite internet ping: roughly 1000-2000 in game...

watch out for squirrel XD

[mag]

looks like I won't be playing online. 
It would be nice to find someone local that like's to play. I could take my laptop and network together.
or I can just keep making instant action maps and learn how to make aip's and then dll's. sounds like alot of reading.

[General BlackDragon]

is dial up available to you? playing Halo on dial up i always got a ping of 300-350. on average. Dial up is better for gaming then satalite is....wich is kinda sad for satalite being so new and expensive...tricks alot of parents into thinking its good.

[{LoC}Phas3r]

did you try it mag?

if your connection is good, you should have a decent experience. It is possible that you suffer some packet lost due to clouds or stuff like that but on a nice day/night you should get a very good connection.

[Avatar]

Satellite Internet access suffers from USUALLY being one-way, and from the latency of having to beam thousands of miles up and back down to/from the satellite. 

Outbound it's USUALLY a nice, slow phone line to the uplink center in Texas, usually on a 1-800 number they provide or through a local node.

Inbound it's an amazingly fat pipe but, as I said, the info has to travel thousands of miles up, then back down, to you.

Clouds don't usually hurt anything unless they're very thick, charged, and/or you're very far north (in which case you use a larger dish to gather more signal).  Thunderstorms are the biggest issue, and like most digital content it's all or nothing.  You either have a connection or you don't.

Now, I say USUALLY several times above because there is two-way satellite links available, they're just USUALLY very very expensive, and they still suffer from the up/down up/down time lag.  At these distances even the speed of light isn't as fast as you might want...

Either way, it can be great for web surfing and downloading huge files, but not so good latency-wise for gaming.

-Av-

[Angstromicus]

Really? I had no idea satellite was even as good as you say, Avatar. Must be a different company. Avoid hughesnet, I have connectivity problems and the download speed is only 1mb/s at best. Even worse, it's usually bogged down by too much traffic. Even worse, there's a 400 mb download limit/day (aka the Fair Access Policy). Though, there's no upload limit.

[mag]

@GBD  I don't have dail up available. satellite is good for internet surfing most the time, but I didn't realize it wasn't good for gaming.

@loc  I tried to connect a couple of times, but the connection was refused. I don't know if it was from the ping or something else I did.

I have a two way connection. but I know from checking the speed it had a high ping rate.

I have hughesnet also. It was direcway when I first got it. the download speed isn't what they promise. if you download large file the speed get progressively slower as you download. which isn't good because it's slow to start with.

[Avatar]

Hughesnet is the first to aggressively  market satellite as broadband for the masses, and you're sharing the Direct TV network, so you're throttled down to next to nothing by their 'fair use policy' restrictions. 

They're basically the last resort for people who can't get anything else and want 'broadband', but a quick look around the internet will show you thousands of disgruntled customers.  When they were Direcway it was expensive but pretty much as I described, a very fat pipe but lots of latency.  Now that they're trying to mainstream things they've not only throttled things, but increased the reset time from 4 to 24 hours...

IOW don't even try to game with it, and look around your area for a dial-up node, because it looks like even one of the free/cheap dialup phone services would be better...

-Av- 

[Angstromicus]

It's also really dumb how they say "Braodband Unbound" when it fails in every sense of the word.

[Avatar]

That's because the 'Marketing' weasels are in another universe than the 'Technodweebs'...

-Av-

[Sonic]

Back in arizona, my campus site used microwave to communicate between the site and the main campus. It made hell on Media Services (the department I worked for at the time) as we were in charge of the Video Confrence system. Normal internet application and SMB File sharing worked nicely though...

I always get a kick out of these Satelite providers trying to boost how they are better than Cable/DSL. After taking my Electronics 101 class a few years back, I know that electricity is expentially faster than light.