What was DWANGO like back in the day?

[Quill]

As a Doomer in the modern age, it's easy and convenient to just hop on a match and get some sweet sweet frags. But back then, online multiplayer wasn't as accessible. I've heard anecdotes from people who had XBand, a similar service but for the Super Nintendo, that their experience was superb. Little to no latency? I can't believe this!

That got me wondering, what was DWANGO like? What was your experience? Latency? Lag?

[Brad_tilf]

Why not experience it for yourself? https://www.doomwadstation.net/dwango/

But yes, since it was in the era of modems, there was some lag at times.

[Daytime Waitress]

Following this thread because I particularly want to hear the experiences of @Doomkid and other folks in Australia. As a former BigPond user circa 1999, I'm imagining it would've been more convenient for them to physically mail their moves to each other over a period of months.

[Dark Pulse]

While I didn't have a PC until 2002 (and so was firmly in the era of early Cable modems), I did have a service called Sega Channel back in the late 90s, where it took a couple of minutes to transmit a game of anywhere from 512 KB-4 MB.

 

I'd think the general consensus would be basically that there was a fair bit of lag and warping, but of course, how bad depended on the server. If the server (or more accurately, host as it would've been generally P2P then) was fairly close by, and they had a good connection, you could get a surprisingly smooth game.

 

Play cross-country, though, or worse, cross-continent, and that would be a whole heck of a lot different.

 

DWANGO's main thing, basically, was that it could allow people to connect to an independent server, thus serving as a way of balancing out the ping. If you were in New York, they were in California, and you could find some server in the middle of the country (north Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas)... you'd both be affected about equally. IIRC this is part of the reason DWANGO was founded in Houston - it'd offer a (roughly equal) ping to the lower 48. (Slightly biased faster for those in the southern half of the US though, as the actual geographical center of the lower 48 is in Kansas, further north.)

[Kinsie]

1 hour ago, Dark Pulse said:

While I didn't have a PC until 2002 (and so was firmly in the era of early Cable modems), I did have a service called Sega Channel back in the late 90s, where it took a couple of minutes to transmit a game of anywhere from 512 KB-4 MB.

Sega Channel was basically an entirely different technology from the standard internet for its downloads. It was effectively a hidden cable TV channel broadcasting an endlessly looping data stream. When you requested a game, the device would have to wait for the game to come back around on the broadcast before it could be streamed into memory.

[Dark Pulse]

30 minutes ago, Kinsie said:

Sega Channel was basically an entirely different technology from the standard internet for its downloads. It was effectively a hidden cable TV channel broadcasting an endlessly looping data stream. When you requested a game, the device would have to wait for the game to come back around on the broadcast before it could be streamed into memory.

Quite aware of that and how the technology worked (you missed the part where it actually was beamed to the cable companies from a satellite, for example). It was mentioned basically to demonstrate how little bandwidth there was to actually do the transmitting, and then analogize that in terms of how modem technology would've been at the time, if not a bit worse.

 

I mean, 1993. We're talking V33 modems, so 14.4 kbits. That's not even 2 KB/sec.

 

The rest of that, though, is pretty accurate. DWANGO tried to centralize its servers, so that people in the region could generally equalize if cross-country, but of course, if you lived close to one of those servers, you got a huge advantage in ping, packet loss, line noise, etc.

[OpenRift]

Honestly, I kind of wish we had the source or server binaries for DWANGO, but sadly it just isn't available. Luckily, there are more modern solutions for getting that DOS multiplayer experience in the modern day, with modern conveniences as well.

[Doomkid]

DWANGO used two commands by default for Doom games, -dup 2 and -extratic.

 

Quote

Ticdup (tic duplication) is a feature of the Doom networking engine which allows the bandwidth used by the game to be reduced. In a normal Doom game, the game clock (see tic) runs at 35 frames per second. In a network game, this means that the players' inputs are sampled 35 times per second. These are placed in structures (called ticcmds), and transmitted to the other computers in the game.

If the ticdup option is used, the sampling occurs at a reduced rate. For example, if a ticdup of 2 is used, the sample rate is reduced to 17.5 times per second (half the rate). As a result, the amount of data transmitted per second is reduced by half. The computers in the game then "double up" the received ticcmd structures: i.e. the same ticcmd is used for consecutive tics.

The drawback to this system is the reduced movement accuracy. The reduced sampling rate means that the player has less precise control over their movement. The graphical framerate is also reduced.

 

Quote

In a normal Doom game, the players' input is sampled 35 times per second (see tic). These inputs are placed in structures called ticcmds. The ticcmd structures are sent as packets to the other computers in the game.

If a packet is lost, the receiving machine transmits a resend request to the sending machine. Under Doom, the game cannot advance until all players have received the ticcmd for the next tic to be run. Packet loss therefore causes a short stall in the game. This affects the perceived "smoothness" of the game.

Over a large-scale network such as the Internet, packet loss is a common occurrence and therefore a serious issue to multiplayer games. If the extratic option is enabled, the Doom engine includes the previously transmitted ticcmd when sending a new ticcmd. The result is that if a single packet is lost (the most likely occurrence), it will not have such a large effect on the game, as the next packet will contain the same ticcmd, removing the need to retransmit.

 

All this is to say, -dup 2 made the game ran at 17.5 FPS rather than 35, which might sound shitty (and it kind of is), but it works wonders in countering the massive slow-downs you can often experience in vanilla Doom with a mid/high ping. It certainly makes deathmatch gameplay feel a lot more responsive. -extratics required more bandwidth, but also meant packets were much more likely to arrive in-tact, naturally keeping the gameplay feeling more consistent.

 

I think it's pretty cool that Doom came OOB with multiple "network improvement" options. Oddly, -dup 2 was (unintentionally) not included by default in IPXSETUP.exe, so the only way to actaully use this cool lag-mitigating feature was via DWANGO. I can't help but wonder if this is the "improved netplay" that some of their ads boasted about (and it's not a lie - DM netplay is definitely faster or more fun with this enabled). xttl actually fixed IPXSETUP a number of years ago to re-enable the -dup command, giving a very accurate experience to what DWANGO would have felt like.

 

18 hours ago, Daytime Waitress said:

Following this thread because I particularly want to hear the experiences of @Doomkid and other folks in Australia. As a former BigPond user circa 1999, I'm imagining it would've been more convenient for them to physically mail their moves to each other over a period of months.

Well, I only started online Dooming in 2001, and lived in the US at that time :) but between talking to some ex-DWANGO players, watching old demos recorded in DWANGO, and playing vanilla DM in DosBox using -dup2 and -extratic, I get the impression it was fun and actually very playable IF you lived within about 2,000 miles or less of the server.

 

International games were of course terrible by comparison (hell, they're not great even today - but far better) but there were still a number of people who loved Doom so much they still played with that terrible lag for a high, high cost! They were definitely the exception, though. Intl. games were too shitty for most Doomers.