iPhone Doom Classic to support Multiplayer over Bluetooth

id Software‘s John Carmack has posted a progress report on iPhone Doom Classic, which reveals that the game will support multiplayer over WiFi and eventually Bluetooth once iPhone OS 3.0 becomes available. He also talked about how bad the latency is over the 3G network.

I looked into the possibility of 3G multiplayer, but the latencies just aren’t good enough — I see 380 or so pings from my phone to local servers. This was interesting, because I have talked to other hardware vendors that claim 3G latencies of half that. I’m not sure if there are issues with the iPhone, issues with AT&T’s network in Dallas, or if the vendor was just mistaken about what they were getting. One anecdotal report is that iPhones work better in Japan than here, so it may be infrastructure.

In the past I’ve been pretty vocal about games not supporting multiplayer over 3G, but after some testing I realized the latency was much too high and unstable, it wasn’t uncommon for my 3G latency to spike to 500ms or more. The only games that are suitable for multiplayer over 3G are turn based games.

I highly recommend reading the full post.

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