Research efforts into the engineering of real-time, distributed, virtual environments for use over the Internet have flourished since DARPA’s first steps in this direction fifteen years ago. The video game “Quake” (from idSoftware), having been the first successful game in this genre, has seen its interface and network usage characteristics become something of a standard in the network entertainment world. As Quake-like games which promise more detailed character skins, richer environment textures, and “realer” physics are released in rapid succession, such applications are quickly becoming the most data-intensive, latency-abhorring, and generally demanding distributed programs running on today’s networks. With this in mind, we have chosen the freely available “Quake I” and “QuakeWorld” sources as the subjects for a series of experiments to determine what transport and network layer strategies result in the best game play for the user, and why. In modifying these sources, we have attempted to define the term “acceptable gameplay” in networked first person shooters, and obtained quantitative data capturing this notion. Furthermore, we have quantitatively demonstrated that the later QuakeWorld code exhibits, as predicted, better network performance than the earlier Quake I code.
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