How do I play doom online?

[jimmy711]

How do I play doom online? I heard it had to do something with ZDaemon.

[Bloodshedder]

Maybe you should READ THE FAQ.

[Creaphis]

If you're feeling a bit overwhelmed by options, I recommend trying Skulltag first. Skulltag downloads come packaged with idese.exe, which is all you need to see what games are currently running.

[EarthQuake]

Odamex - Oldschool Doom with nearly non-existent playerbase.
Skulltag - Newschool Doom with somewhat existent playerbase.
ZDaemon - Middle ground between Odamex and Skulltag with a very, very existent playerbase.

Skulltag has the most going for it feature-wise, while ZDaemon is an easy way to jump into the action and all. Odamex is for those players who really like the classic game at it's core. They are all good choices, but it depends upon your preference. I suggest you try playing them all.

[jimmy711]

I tried ZDameon and Skulltag. I like Skulltag alot more. I just wish there was more players at Skulltag.

[Maes]

What sort of comms model do these ports use? I only ever used ZDaemon, but I got modem-like pings for most servers (>200 ms) and when hosting my guests were "treated" to delights such as 10000ms pings. Great if you want to pretend you're the unbeatable Doom King of your own petty kingdom...but a bit boring after a while...

Is there some sort of client-side player movement prediction/correction? The player inputs are synchronized to the tic even if that means pausing, or it's just loose and asynchronous, leaving slower connections behind?

[myk]

Maes said:
What sort of comms model do these ports use? I only ever used ZDaemon, but I got modem-like pings for most servers (>200 ms) and when hosting my guests were "treated" to delights such as 10000ms pings. Great if you want to pretend you're the unbeatable Doom King of your own petty kingdom...but a bit boring after a while...

Sounds like your Internet is teh suck :p

Your ping should not be that bad when connecting to European servers. I get 250 to Europe and I'm in South America. If your hosting gives others a very high ping, then your uploading bandwidth is pretty weak.

Is there some sort of client-side player movement prediction/correction? The player inputs are synchronized to the tic even if that means pausing, or it's just loose and asynchronous, leaving slower connections behind?

In ZDaemon and such, yes, there's prediction. Slower connections function normally, but other players may be displaced to them. The "single player" engines generally don't use it, though, so you'll get slowdowns when far away connecting through them, hence they are good only against people that are relatively close. They generally do support sending more packets (the FAQ linked above notes this), which is akin to client prediction (not sure whether prediction itself is more elaborate somehow).

[Maes]

I generally find other FPS such as Battlefield 1942 to be acceptable on the same connection (pings in the 90-150 order, 8 mbps DSL) so I'm thinking maybe there's something broken in the way ZDaemon uses the bandwidth, e.g. the classic "too many small and fast packets" problems, which generally trigger bandwidth throttling.

[myk]

From what I've heard, DOOM client/server applications aren't as optimal as more modern games that were designed so their information could be sent effectively over the Internet, so yeah, they may perform worse than other games.