ioquake3 (and probably many other games) use Huffman Coding to optimize data transmission between the server and the clients. Huffman coding helps reduce the size of transmitted data, improving performance and lowering bandwidth usage. It is crucial for real-time multiplayer gaming.
This is where I first came across Huffman Coding, as a kid (I was only 14 years old) at the time. I have fond memories developing mods for ioquake3 forks such as Tremulous and Urban Terror.
Just to reiterate: the primary focus of Huffman coding is to minimize the total number of bits needed to represent a message. It is strictly for compression. If you want error correction, you should probably go for Hamming codes, Reed-Solomon codes, turbo codes, or CRC. That said, you can combine Huffman coding with those error correction codes. However, while not an error correction mechanism, mismatches in the Huffman tree during decoding can sometimes flag errors, as invalid bit sequences may indicate data corruption.
ioquake3 (and probably many other games) use Huffman Coding to optimize data transmission between the server and the clients. Huffman coding helps reduce the size of transmitted data, improving performance and lowering bandwidth usage. It is crucial for real-time multiplayer gaming.
This is where I first came across Huffman Coding, as a kid (I was only 14 years old) at the time. I have fond memories developing mods for ioquake3 forks such as Tremulous and Urban Terror.
Just to reiterate: the primary focus of Huffman coding is to minimize the total number of bits needed to represent a message. It is strictly for compression. If you want error correction, you should probably go for Hamming codes, Reed-Solomon codes, turbo codes, or CRC. That said, you can combine Huffman coding with those error correction codes. However, while not an error correction mechanism, mismatches in the Huffman tree during decoding can sometimes flag errors, as invalid bit sequences may indicate data corruption.
See some code here (with educational comments):
- https://github.com/ioquake/ioq3/blob/cc18246f22ab033e1b17af4...
- https://github.com/ioquake/ioq3/blob/cc18246f22ab033e1b17af4...
The code is used here: https://github.com/ioquake/ioq3/blob/cc18246f22ab033e1b17af4...
See some sample code from EPIP[1]
Also reminiscent of zig zag encoding for ints.
[1]: https://github.com/adnanaziz/EPIJudge/blob/master/epi_judge_...
I still remember when I first learned about Huffman Coding so many years ago. Computers/math are amazing.