Fabien Sanglard's Website

submited by
Style Pass
2024-11-23 01:00:02

The network model of Quake3 is with no doubt the most elegant part of the engine. At the lower level Quake III still abstract communications with the NetChannel module that first appeared in Quake World. The most important thing to understand is: In a fast paced environment any information that is not received on first transmission is not worth sending again because it will be too old anyway. As a result the engine relies essentially on UDP/IP: There is no trace of TCP/IP anywhere since the "Reliable transmission" aspect introduced intolerable latency. The network stack has been augmented with two mutually exclusive layers: Encryption using preshared key. Compression with pre-computed huffman key.

But where the design really shine is on the server side where an elegant system minimize the size of each UDP datagram while compensating for the unreliablity of UDP: An history of snapshots generate deltas packets via memory introspection. Architecture

Leave a Comment