Wireless Broadband okay for gaming?

tim3115

Or does it matter at all?



Thanking you.

1huge1

should'nt be a problem with wireless and adsl its satellite that would be crap for online games

sharingan

It depends on the ISP and the technology. When LOS(Line of sight)-services like breeze are working for you, it should be just as good as any wired *DSL service. Non-LOS services like RipWave, not a chance. Even under good connections and good bandwidth, your pings will be erratic. This is normal for this kind of service.

bingo9999

what are breeze and ripwave? do you not just install the network adapters or their equivalent and treat it as it was wired?

SkepticOne

Ripwave is a wireless modem that doesn't require an external antenna. It is not suitable for gaming as pings are very high.

bingo9999

But if you were working off a normal router and there are a few computers in the house its just network adapters or cards ya?
Thanks

SkepticOne

bingo9999 wrote:

But if you were working off a normal router and there are a few computers in the house its just network adapters or cards ya?
Thanks

I'm not sure I understand the question, but regardless of what routers you have or the number of computers in the house, you will be limited by the latency of the connection between you and the ISP.

Ripwave will always be high latency.

Zynks

If I understand the question, you want to know if a wireless LAN will be good enough to play games between computers in your house, right? The answer in case case would be yes, I believe it will be enough to handle any games you throw at it, but I would suggest to go for 802.11g (54 Mbps, as opposed to 802.11b @ 11 Mbps). Wired would be slightly better, but the hassle of running wires may not justify the benefits.

If you are using the wireless LAN to connect to a wired (ADSL) Internet connection, then the benefits of a local wired connection at home are even less relevant...

AdMMM

Sharing it wirelessly will be fine.

There is an initial 2ms hop to the router but after that it's plain sailing!

bingo9999

If all the computers in a house are networked wirelessly can the computers all read from the cd drive of the "main" computer? what I mean is, is it possible to play with all the computers from the one cd or does each need its own? I hope this wont be seen as off topic

chloe2k

You would need to create a local area network in order to do this. Windows XP will do this automatically via a wizard for you. I wouldn't bother with any OS below 2000.

bingo9999

but that can be done? Say for example i bought battlefield 2 or something, i would only need the one copy? It would be between a laptop and desktop both with XP and pretty good specs. That would be great, i was under the illusion i would have to buy a game for each computer

JNive

or you can make an image, store it on a network drive, and use a virtual drive program ( alcohol 120 and daemon tools etc ) to mount it on each computer

bingo9999

sounds complicated, how does it work? Easy to do? If you would need to be fairly advanced at computers and stuff i dunno if id be good enought but it sounds interesting

SkepticOne

People on the games forum would have more info I think. It all depends on whether the game has built in protections to prevent identical copies playing against each other.

JNive

regardless of in-game protections a cd image of it can be accessed more than once, as far as i know, and considering the fact that it is usually accessed upon startup of the game only

I get dsl which i used to distribute throughout the house wirelessly. If i used two wireless nodes (desktop / laptop) in the same room i would add 20-40 ms to my ping time on a HL2 server i play on. If i then disabled the laptop my pings would come way down.

The laptop was idle by the way - I can only guess that some interference was being generated.

bingo9999

You get extra ping by having an idle laptop on the wireless signal? Wouldnt that take from the speed? Even if its not downloading there must be some amount of signal it takes for baisic kinda stuff? If it works its great, ill try that when i have my wireless broadband!

Yes, i got extra ping, which was really bad for the gaming. I dont know why this happened but the two machines were only about 1 meter away from the access point so there may have been a lot of interference.

bingo9999

Oh sorry i misunderstood that a high ping was a bad thing, Im not too well up on terminology. I guess it makes sense if the laptop was sucking some signal for running an update or antivirus r sumting. Guess its best just to leave it off, it was idle after all