Sounds like you're on the right track with the reliable/unreliable
message types. HL servers use UDP packets, which are not gauranteed
delivery by definition of the protocol. At the IP layer, no
acknowledgement is sent back to the sender, so the sender can never be
sure that the packet was received. A packet is considered "lost" if it
is not received by the recipient.
A more complex packet delievery system can be implemented at the
application layer using UDP packets, and this sounds like what is done
with halflife's reliable/unreliable message types.
I am unsure of which HUD icons you are talking about. Servers that have
high loss may also be experiencing other problems, and the other
problems also could contribute to the phenomena you described.
Dave
On Wed, 2003-08-27 at 06:50, Niall FitzGibbon wrote:
> I don't know a lot about the network protocols, but I do think that lost
> packets ARE re-sent by the server -- unless lost packets simply arrive very
> late. This is because sometimes when playing on a server with high loss,
> HUD status icons will appear much later than they should have (up to a
> second or so). Now for those icons and many other components of the Half-
> Life message system, the request for the client to display the icon is only
> sent only once, in the frame it is activated. The fact that the icons can
> appear so much later than they should do suggests that the packet must have
> been lost, but the message was still eventually received by the client.
> Whether the server re-sends the lost packet (or simply sends the "icon
> display" message in a later packet) or whether the packet arrives very,
> very late, I'm not sure. However, I've never seen a situation where HUD
> icons simply do not appear when supposed to due to packet loss, so I think
> there must be some form of re-sending in place (though certainly in high
> packet loss servers it is possible for many game sounds to fail to play on
> the client -- perhaps this difference a result of Half-Life's
> reliable/unreliable message types).
>
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