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Anti Lag Technology Startup: Bigfoot

The story is I was at this millionaire’s business place (I was about to go flying with him for work), and on the table was Fortune magazine, and on the cover was some startup company contest, and something about gaming lag. A gamer article in a business mag? Intrigued, I picked it up. (Note, I found the online version of this article here, scroll down to the 3rd place winner).

I think the article was about young business school grads who compete to receive some startup seed money from Fortune– one was on an online test prep course (for SATs), one was for a brain pressure monitor, and one was by a couple of MBA CS fans who wanted to fix lag now and forever, so they’ve formed a startup called Bigfoot Networks, and have developed a product, and are, as I understand it, waiting to be bought out.

I found their website, which has not had any news updates since november of last year, so perhaps they are just waiting. It looks like a network interface card, but I’m not sure if it’s for clients, or the gameserver, or somewhere else inline. Here’s a short quote:

“A chip architect at Intel until 2004, Beverly had already developed technologies to accelerate the speed of Intel’s servers by offloading some of the computers’ processes onto a storage card. After researching how to fight the dreaded lag, he realized that he could speed online games similarly. Beverly’s breakthrough: a computer card that communicates with servers, downloading some of the processes that they perform online and allowing them to run faster, thus speeding up online games.
…they formed Bigfoot Networks and developed a prototype called NetBlazer, a gaming accelerator card that can eliminate disruptions caused by server lags. Assuming that Bigfoot can raise more money, it hopes to begin selling NetBlazer by July for $300…Although computer manufacturers such as Dell are luring online gamers with ultrafast processors, none, says Cole, has offered a solution for lag disruptions.”

OK whatever. But what is really cool is their research on lag. I mean we all know lag, different kinds of lag– warping, stuttering, dropouts, etc., but you haven’t thought about it like these guys. I present to you:

Bigfoot Network’s White Paper on Lag (pdf)

whoa. I’ll keep an eye on these guys to see if they get bought out, and begin shipping a product.

It makes me wonder if, in the future of gaming, if network demands will rise as fast as graphics demands have been rising with each generation– this has certainly not been the case so far– UT2004 has much the same network demands as UT99– but would could a game do with a world in which we had a lot more bandwidth and less latency? hmm. I remember when I couldn’t imagine what we’d do with more than 128K RAM, or the yawning abyss of a 10megabyte hard drive in the 8088 IBM XT– it simply changes the parameters of what is possible.

Anyways, here’s a brief quote from the Intro of the Lag White Paper:

“One of the most annoying things for an online gamer is “lag”…This paper will first explore what is Lag in today’s gaming world; what is a fair definition? Lag will be defined as one or more of the following in-game events:
* Game Freezing and Stuttering
* Warping and Rubber-banding
* Ghosting and Vanishing
* Slash-Slash-Pause
* Delayed Responses
* Frames-per-Second Loss

After Lag and the above terms are defined clearly, this white paper will discuss what the causes of Lag are in today’s internet system using broadband connections of the above phenomenon. The causes will be clearly shown as:
*Server Slowness/Congestion
* Internet Packet Loss/Spikes
* Client Slowness
* Network Latency

Several case studies and research will be used to illustrate the concepts explored here. The case studies will include:
* Sony Everquest Client Test
* Sony Star Wars Galaxies Client Test
* Star Wars Battlefront Client+Server Test
* Battlefield: Vietnam Client+Server Test
* Counterstrike Source Client+Server Test

Finally, the obvious question would be what can be done about Lag?

Defining Lag
Lag has no definition. It is a slang term that online gamers have been using since the early days of online gaming to represent anything ‘funky’ going on in an online game. Today, anything bad that happens in an online game is called Lag… Lag could be loosely defined today as everything bad that happens in an online game. It’s become like an online curse word. The only way then, to define Lag, is by looking at those perceived events which gamers attribute to Lag. Those events vary in type and cause, but they are collectively called Lag.

First among these perceived events are the movement or action related events. Game Freezing, Game Stuttering, Warping, and Rubber-banding are terms commonly associated with movement or action based Lag events. Game Freezing occurs when the game appears to suddenly pause for no reason, then after some perceivable time, resume. Game Stuttering is the same as Game Freezing, but happens in rapid succession one right after another. Warping is a movement action weather 3rd person or 1st person perspective, where the character or persona is suddenly in a new position on the screen/in the game world than was expected. When the warping is back to a location that the gamer believed he just left, it is called Rubber-banding.

The next category of Lag is those events where other users or computer controlled characters exhibit strange perceived behaviour. Ghosting, Vanishing, and Slash-Slash-Pause fall into this category. Ghosting is when…”

Okay, you get the idea. We’ve all experienced it, and here are guys who take it seriously, and are trying to tackle it with a boatload of startup capital. Read more at the PDF yourself, and take a look at their site:

Link:
Bigfoot Networks

This entry was posted on February 24, 2006 at 2:13 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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