Terminology that drives you crazy
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Of course not. There's a lot of work done to compensate for lag in a lot of videogames. Fighting games' networking code is extensively tuned to account for lag, and there's even settings in training mode to simulate lag in order to help you compensate for it.
I just gave the example of Dota because that's one game that doesn't compensate at all for lag on the input side of things. For how Dota works, it makes a lot of sense to do so and is the correct approach. It's probably not in other genres where players have a lot more input options, so that's why people put a lot of effort into building netcode that compensates for lag (and often bad netcode ends up hurting the low-latency players).
Latency is a real problem when playing videogames over the net. Latency spikes ("jitters") is, too, and it's probably a bigger issue, as correctly posited by whatever random study analyzed Madden. Often both are intrinsically related to how the game compensates for lag. But to claim that latency doesn't matter at all is completely idiotic and disprovable in 5 minutes.
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But to claim that latency doesn't matter at all is completely idiotic
And a claim no-one here has made.
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I'd also strongly argue that making a game where a constant 100ms latency differential gives you a nigh-insurmountable advantage is extremely bad design -- there is a geographical lower bound on latency, and even the best transoceanic fibers near 100ms by themselves.
Bad design would be to dumb down the game in order to compensate for ridiculous playing conditions. And that's coming from someone who has 150ms at the minimum against the US and 250~ against Europe.
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Bad design would be to dumb down the game in order to compensate for ridiculous playing conditions.
So now you're saying that only people with fast strong connections should be allowed to enjoy the games?Do you play Counterstrike competitively perchance?
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If you are going to play Counterstrike, you should play at your local servers, where you'll get a decent latency of 40-70ms. If you go to another country's server and expect not to have a bad time with 150+, you're crazy. If you're in fucking Japan and want to play Counterstrike on a South African server, you're fucking stupid and the game shouldn't have to bend over backwards for you.
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As I thought; an elitist.
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We've talked about this before, but:
Protocol, as over abused on TV.
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Protocol
Like the IP protocol?
And all variations of above. If you use a fucking acronym / initialism learn what it means! Or at least the last word, so you don't do shit like that.
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Like the IP protocol?
Two more common ones that are inexcusable:
ATM Machine
PIN NumberAnd I bet someone's said at some point "KISS, stupid!"
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KISS, stupid!
I find stupidity to be a turn-off, so no thanks.
I guess that's why I'm single...
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Like the IP protocol?
No. Like, when they talk about just doing stuff.
We haven't applied that protocol yet.
Redundant words after acronyms don't bother me at all. I quite enjoy taunting the compulsive CDOs around here.
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No. Like, when they talk about just doing stuff.
Sorry, badly constructed post. I got your original point, it just reminded me of what I ranted about.
I quite enjoy taunting the compulsive CDOs around here.
*shakes fist*
Well, I'm not OCD, just allergic to ignorance.
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Well, before formulating any theories, the least you could do is record your own empiric experiences with the subject matter.
Based on my experiences, both as a video gamer and as a guy providing technical support to
whiny punksvideo gamers, I've found that (casual, since I have no experience with professionals) video gamers fall into two categories.- Those that realize they suck at the game
- Those that blame their extremely bad decision to [stand in fire that never moves, initiate 1v5, run off away from the mutual support range of the team] on lag
Those that fall into category #2 almost exclusively classify their lag as the magic "150" number that shows up on screen, which is the latency snapshot. Now, I will concede that there are two good reasons for them to focus on the number:
- It's the only one really presented to them because
- It's pretty difficult to quantify jitter into a single hard metric that you can put up for the
whiny punksenthusiasts playing your game that have to have that number tounderstandblame for why they suck.
<pedant>
Also, at least from the way I'm thinking about it, 150ms latency is client-to-server, and isn't necessarily the most important consideration -- if you have 150ms latency in a game with 9 people who have 300ms latency, your connection is king. Relativity matters here. And I'm totally sick of hearing people say "oh my ping!" when they have little disconnects from the game because their in-house WiFi just took a crap again. (Sorry to my LoL friend jungle main if you're reading this)
</pedant>
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Look, I agree that people are far too quick to blame lag for whatever reason, the same reason why most 3k players in Dota constantly whine about being better than their teammates when the matchmaking algorithm Valve employs is actually pretty fucking accurate at guessing your skill level. But saying there's not a noticeable jump from 70 to 150 is bullshit, I'm sorry. That doesn't mean you can't compensate, it just means you're going to have a harder time.
Most people actually don't even know what latency is and call lag having a computer that can't keep up with the graphics. That doesn't change the realities of latency, though.
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Yeah, an elitist who has been forced to play at 150ms ping a lot of times because of where I live.
It's not the game designers' fault that my local community is shit for a bunch of good videogames, sorry.
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I like lag bolts.
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Don't forget that besides network latency, you also have input latency, display latency and so on. (Carmack's take on that, and here with details.)
So, in addition to that 100ms latency, you'll get at the very least 16ms (double buffering at 60Hz) plus whatever time it takes your display to change the pixel (see Carmack's measurements). Chances are that at least another frame is queued up already (another 16ms). Depending on how you run updates in your game loop, there might be an additional frame etc. It adds up.
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It's not the game designers' fault that my local community is shit for a bunch of good videogames, sorry.
And yet you're angry that game-makers are trying to compensate for bad connections, so people can play games.TDEMSYE
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Speaking to Dota, I can play just fine on 120ms connection (my friends like to play US West because US East has a tendancy to be shit, and most of them are closer to that server anyway).
The problem with Dota compared to LoL is that reaction time is much more important because every hero has a turn rate. To move in a new direction/use an ability/blink away you have to turn towards the direction first before you can take the action. LoL doesn't have a concept of turn rate. Anything you do is instantly done. If you don't react fast enough in Dota you can quite easily get into a situation you can't avoid. If you were in the same situation in LoL you have a higher window of time to react because you don't have to wait to turn.
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Because that would make the games themselves worse, it's not that complicated.
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So you're saying, in order to make games better, developers should ignore gamers.
TDEMSYR
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No, they should ignore things they can't work around, like the speed of light.
Jesus it's not that complicated of a concept.
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Assuming this plays are the right time, this is what I mean:
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So much for dropping my post rate…
No, they should ignore things they can't work around, like the speed of light.
Sure they should. And when they then release a game that's a commercial failure, and the studio folds, and all those hardworking souls lose their jobs, that's still OK?
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Okay, so let's just all make mobile freemium games because that's what sells the most. Is that what you're talking about? Let's stop making games altogether, since it's impossible to capture the entire human population as a userbase.
I'm not gonna get dragged into this. You need to make a cut off line somewhere. You can't expect people to develop action games compensating for 1000ms input lag between Japan and South Africa, I'm sorry. That makes the experience worse for the people actually playing the game at sane latency ratios.
If you can't see it, there's no way we can hold a conversation together in this topic.
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Okay, so let's just all make mobile freemium games because that's what sells the most.
Sweet merciful Chaos, fuck no.
@dstopia said:Let's stop making games altogether, since it's impossible to capture the entire human population as a userbase.
And now you're being ridiculous.
@dstopia said:You can't expect people to develop action games compensating for 1000ms input lag between Japan and South Africa, I'm sorry.
No. But I can expect them to at least try.
@dstopia said:That makes the experience worse for the people actually playing the game at sane latency ratios.
Only if your netcode is shit; good netcode will scale the compensation to cope.
@dstopia said:If you can't see it, there's no way we can hold a conversation together in this topic.
All I see is you saying people with poor Internet connections shouldn't be allowed to play the games they want to play, just because of your elitist bullshit.
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All I see is you saying people with poor Internet connections shouldn't be allowed to play the games they want to play, just because of your elitist bullshit.
Then your reading comprehension is bad. They are allowed to play. They just have to submit to a poorer experience unless they use their local servers.
Look, if you have to compensate for 1000ms, inevitably the compensation comes at the cost of the people playing the game at sane levels. There's no magic bullet here.
I'm done with this. You obviously don't understand what is at stake when building a multiplayer competitive game, probably because you haven't played many.
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To the level where I need to get super-anal about every single possible cause of lag and latency?
http://vonblancofitness.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/aint-nobody-got-time-for-that.jpg
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You can't expect people to develop action games compensating for 1000ms input lag between Japan and South Africa, I'm sorry.
Plus, obvious strawman (or at least an over-exaggeration of your point) here. Backbone latency between Japan and South Africa is in the 400ms range. So if the latency being compensated for is 1000ms, then there's a (another) bad connection in the link somewhere, and that connection is probably congested, which will lead to major consistency (jitter, packet loss) problems that are going to cause much more severe issues than latency (which, when consistent, can be adjusted for, like how Madden does... if I can remember to be bothered, I'll link that study when I get home).
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I was being facetious, Jesus. 400ms is also unplayable for a wide host of genres, so the point still stands.
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You're not very bright.
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You're not very bright.
Trust me, if I was glowing, I wouldn't be stoking this little flame war
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So you're saying, in order to make games better, developers should ignore gamers.
Here's the thing: it depends on what kind of game you want to make.If you're looking at something that's trying to be an actual esports title -- and my experience here is watching Starcraft, so I'll use that as an example -- it makes sense to compromise the general experience a bit. Why? Because things like high-level tournaments are a sizable part of the scene, and those will often be played on-site on a low-latency connection. In those situations, not compensating for lag (or having very light compensation) allows the players to have faster reactions, micro better, etc., which helps to distinguish players at the highest levels, which is the point of the game and the tournament.
Now, obviously they can't completely compromise the experience for everyone (and something like SC does have varying amounts of lag compensation IIRC) or the pool of both players and spectators will be much smaller. But if you're not excluding a ton of people, saying "get a good connection" isn't so unreasonable.
Now, maybe that's a bit elitist, and if you think so, then guilty as charged. But I also don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
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OK, for dedicated e-sports, fair enough. But most of those games are also played outside of e-sports set-ups, so there should be some consideration at least ;)
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There's one problem with your argument -- latency is something the server and individual clients can measure -- and the compensations can be scaled accordingly -- so if everyone has 10ms ping, there's no compensation, but if you have players with 200-300ms pings, the lag compensation gets cranked up to match to keep the game consistently playable for everyone.
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The issue starts appearing when otherwise normal latency players (40-70ms range) get a guy who clicks on a server on the other side of the world and enters the game at 500ms.
That's when compensation fucks up everybody involved. Which is exactly the real world scenario you need to take into account when taking such decisions, because you'll never get equal latency distribution against a centralized server.
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I was being facetious, Jesus. 400ms is also unplayable for a wide host of genres, so the point still stands.
Starsiege: Tribes could host 64 players on a 56.6k modem.
Modern games have shitty netcode compared to older games, because the necessity of tightening-it-up has gone away. Well it hasn't gone away, but the guys making the games are all on gigabit with fiber connections, so they sure as hell aren't eating their own dogfood.
Note that the Crytek Engine seems to for whatever reason have significantly worse netcode than all the others. Oh, except Call of Duty: Ghosts which had excrement netcode even after being patched like 3 times to fix it. (Thank God Advanced Warfare got it right.)
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There's one problem with your argument -- latency is something the server and individual clients can measure -- and the compensations can be scaled accordingly...
Doing that isn't free either. If you continuously vary the compensation to match the lag, it means that players aren't playing with a consistent setting. Picking a couple different settings that it could select from is better, but it still has a bit of that problem. It also means that, as @dstopia hints at, players with low lag can't consistently play or practice at that setting.It's a tradeoff between appeasing a wider range of people and making a core set of fans happier, and where on that continuum you should fall depends on the game and your goals for it.
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There's only so much you can do against the speed of light. It's not a matter of server capacity, it's a matter of real world physics limitations.
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Pffft. We all know EA has an ansible hidden deep underground.
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As referenced upthread, the speed of light limitation is 140ms from a point in Africa on the equator, all the way around the world to the same point.
So, obviously, the 400ms "base latency" from Japan to South Africa is due to a number of considerations other than speed of light delay, since even an indirect path from Japan to SA isn't going to be longer than circling the earth 3 times. Some of those other considerations: delays caused by routers handling the packet (typically 1-5ms per router); delays caused by BGP exchanges between networks (again, typically fairly small); delays caused by congestion between networks (usually the big whammy, and usually not horribly consistent delays); delays caused by limitations in the carrying technology (at my company, for example, we see 5-10ms delay on physical WiFi-like fixed wireless links where a fiber link of the same physical distance would be 2-3ms delay)
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A colleague of mine has a gigabit symmetrical. Another has 500mbit. I make do with 50mbit.
How quickly does Discourse load on a 0.0000000476837158 Mbit connection?
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Seriously, do ANY of the people in this thread other than dstopia play any online games that involve more multiplayer interaction than Bejeweled? Or are you all just trolling him for kicks?
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Seriously, do ANY of the people in this thread other than dstopia play any online games that involve more multiplayer interaction than Bejeweled? Or are you all just trolling him for kicks?
Let's see… do I play online games a lot… yes
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And already admitted to just trolling, so I think my statement is still an accurate either/or assessment.
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Call it the speed of electrons going through a network full of nodes and gates, whatever, it doesn't really matter because what matters is that you can't make it go away.
The point is there are physical limitations beyond the scope of the game to handle. There's nothing game designers can do about it, and aggresively compensating fucks up the players playing the game at sane latency ranges. Netcode isn't a magic bullet, in the same way that crying "LAG!!!" doesn't justify you being a useless piece of shit in a Dota game.
