Newbie Questions

Posted: Wed Aug 03, 2005 7:48 pm

Hi im new to gc online gaming and xlink and was wondering about a couple of things!!!

1. what else do i need as well as a gc broadband adaptor and ethernet cable with an RJ45 connector ???

2. Is it easy to find a PAL mk:dd opponent online???

3. Is there a lot of lag if me and my mate play on my gamecube against 1 or 2 other players online (512kb)????

4. What game is best online and is it mk:dd most people play (hardly anyone talks about 1080 or kirby air ride in the forums) ?????

Thanks in advance!!!!

Posted: Fri Aug 05, 2005 2:44 am

Natdaman @ Wed Aug 03, 2005 1:48 pm wrote:

Hi im new to gc online gaming and xlink and was wondering about a couple of things!!!

1. what else do i need as well as a gc broadband adaptor and ethernet cable with an RJ45 connector ???

Look in the list of supported setups on the Getting Started page. It can explain it much better than I can.

Natdaman @ Wed Aug 03, 2005 1:48 pm wrote:

2. Is it easy to find a PAL mk:dd opponent online???

Lots of people have lost interest in GameCube with Kai because of the lack of new games and the games' bad behavior in latency. Sometimes there are as many as three people, other times there's no one at all to play with. Hopefully GCARS-CS will pique some interest.

Natdaman @ Wed Aug 03, 2005 1:48 pm wrote:

3. Is there a lot of lag if me and my mate play on my gamecube against 1 or 2 other players online (512kb)????

Latency is more important than bandwidth; check the latency of a ping before your play. 40ms or lower will be a near-full-speed game; 100ms or lower will be playable. Although your concept of playable is very subjective. With GCARS-CS, I've played a 110ms game that had no noticible lag; it's closer to the performance of Xbox and PS2 games.

Natdaman @ Wed Aug 03, 2005 1:48 pm wrote:

4. What game is best online and is it mk:dd most people play (hardly anyone talks about 1080 or kirby air ride in the forums) ?????

If you want to know about lag, 1080 is best, followed closely by MKDD. KAR is incredibly laggy, and uses like twice the bandwidth of the other games. GCARS-CS is better than the LAN games by far when it comes to lag. Now, which game do most people play? Mario Kart, by far. GCARS-CS should become popular once it properly supports Kai (right now it's untested, and older versions didn't work right). Look for the other posts on GCARS-CS on this forum for updates on it.

Kai Beginner Joined: 17 Jan 2005 Posts: 49

Hey Biolizard, what happened to the Team-GX site? I can't access it for some reason; is it still up? (If so, it's probably just the weird Internet setup at this hotel I'm in.)

Posted: Fri Aug 05, 2005 7:04 pm

sharpener @ Thu Aug 04, 2005 10:26 pm wrote:

Hey Biolizard, what happened to the Team-GX site? I can't access it for some reason; is it still up? (If so, it's probably just the weird Internet setup at this hotel I'm in.)

Everything looks normal here. Confused

Posted: Tue Aug 09, 2005 12:36 am

As far as PAL players, there are about as many on as NTSC as far as I can tell; the difference is the time of day they'll be on. You should check during the evening in Europe.

To expound on your lag question, the number of players on a single GameCube doesn't seem to affect lag; it's the number of GameCubes trying to network together that affects that. In general, trying to connect more than 2 Cubes together doesn't work unless all 3 (or more) players are relatively close to each other physically. But you could play with 2 Cubes and 4 players each with the same lag as a 1-on-1 game!

Hope that helps!

Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2005 11:52 pm

Yellig @ Mon Aug 08, 2005 6:36 pm wrote:

As far as PAL players, there are about as many on as NTSC as far as I can tell; the difference is the time of day they'll be on. You should check during the evening in Europe.

To expound on your lag question, the number of players on a single GameCube doesn't seem to affect lag; it's the number of GameCubes trying to network together that affects that. In general, trying to connect more than 2 Cubes together doesn't work unless all 3 (or more) players are relatively close to each other physically. But you could play with 2 Cubes and 4 players each with the same lag as a 1-on-1 game!

Hope that helps!

Not quite. The lag doesn't depend on the total # of Cubes; it depends on the latency of a round trip between all the Cubes. That is to say, if the pings between 3 Cubes are 20, 30, and 40, the effective ping will be 0.5*(20+30+40) = 45. If two or more GameCubes are on the same LAN or (to a lesser extent) ISP and geographic location, it won't add much additional lag.

Also, number of players does affect lag, but not in the way you would expect. If any of the Cubes had 4 players, lag will be cut in half, because the full-speed framerate drops to 30fps for NTSC and PAL60, and 25fps for PAL50.

Nintendo Specialist Joined: 23 Jun 2004 Posts: 1889

man i remember back in the day when there were like 20+ people in the Mario Kart arena. Good times....