Zephro posted:

Nope. The netcode worked fine on John Carmack's home T1, less fine on everybody else's 33.6k modems. QW was released as a free download a few months after the original game shipped. They rewrote the game to do things like client-side prediction while keeping final authority with the server, basically allowing the client-side sim and the server-side one to evolve in parallel so that the game didn't freeze while waiting for server packets, but with the server having final authority on What Really Happened.

I don't know if id pioneered those sort of lag-hiding techniques but QW definitely popularised them and most online games today use basically the same ideas.

John Carmack's old .plan files are really interesting if anyone feels like diving into the history of online multiplayer gaming: https://fabiensanglard.net/fd_proxy/doom3/pdfs/johnc-plan_1996.pdf