Games on Citrix

[rchstar]

Does anyone have any experience running games(educational classromm stuff)in terimal server sessions. These are kids games like reader rabbit, math blaster etc. The games will play on the workstations, but there is a lag in the sound to video of about 3 seconds. I have tried just about all configurations I can think of. Server in W2K running on Dell
dual PII300 CPU 128M ram. Workstations are win95/98 Pentium class(150-200). Lan network is 10/100 Any advice is greatly
appreciated!
RobH@craftek.net

 

[hansha]

It should work on a terminal server, but check that you have metaframe 1.8 on the server and that you set Audio Quality to LOW in the Published application manager/Program Neighborhood unless you have a 1GB line and a very big server. Remember that, for playing games on the citrix server, you need a lot of memory and fast processors.

 

[Nostferatu]

The main thing that can be a problem with any type of game is the graphics, as the server is just recieving key and mouse infomation from the client and sending screen refreshes back, any "animated" application (strongly recommend that you turn off that infernal paperclip help tool in office, and NEVER use screen savers on the Terminal server...) can cause network and processor load.

you dont want to attempt to publish anything that requires anymore than 256 colours if your intend to do this on any server less than an absolute monster. So you will need to ask if the requirement will justify the costs required in purchasing such a server(s)...

Your best bet is to hope for a reply from Citrixenginner however, as I know he has had experience of this, If I remember correctly he managed to get Quake running... hehe, now if that isnt graphically intensive, then I dont know what is...

Games also generally use sound to compliment the overall "user experience" that makes them enjoyable... this will also put considerable pressure on your network and servers.

This could be a costly exercise and may not be the best "priced" solution...

Any more details on the software/number of users would help in giving a better idea of your server requirements.

Hope this helps...


Steve Marshall
Group IT
Technical Support Supervisor
(aka General Meddler)
The Expro Group
Reading
UK

 

[CitrixEngineer]

I think I posted a reply to another message along these lines.

I did have a lot of fun getting 10 users playing Quake on a quad-processor box with 4GB RAM and a 128Mb cache RAID controller on a quiet private network. It wasn't very fast, admittedly - we were looking at about 25 fps, albeit a little jittery!

Frame rate is the main concern - screen updates is what is passed by the ICA protocol (remember it's application layer), so anything that requires high fps is going to suffer.

Your point about audio is also very valid - at high quality you're taking 1.3Mb bandwidth. Even at medium quality you need 64k, so there's almost no chance of doing this over a dial-up link - especially in the UK.

The bottom line is that MetaFrame was designed to deliver business applications which may incorporate mutlimedia. In all the literature it states that Graphics, Database and DOS-based programs are not suitable candidates for this environment.

I would suggest that the word "yet" can safely be appended to that last statement...

The best bet at the moment, IMO, is to use games that have built-in TCP/IP network support and use that method.

Hope this helps!

 

[clocke2000]

One tip that will really help out with sound lag is to disable disk Caching in the client.