High ping players = Server lag?
Posted: 2010-02-18 15:59
Yesterday on the UKWF server, we had quite a laggy round. At the same time, there was another player that had a ping of 400.
Several people started to call for admins to kick this player because: "He was causing the lag".
This fired up a discussion between people who taught this was true and people who people taught this was a myth.
One of the hilarious quotes:
Doing some Googling, I found this thread with some explanation.
And I think this one covers it best:
It is indeed a myth on the Battlefield series of engines. The basic problem revolves around how to maintain a sane game world in many clients connected to one server over links of varying latencies.
The Battlefield series of engines does this by making clients connected with high latencies disadvantaged in that the server trusts its view of the world at all times. A client says 'i just shot in this direction' and the server checks if the shots hit something, and applies damage if so. Unfortunately if the client is out of date (because of a slow link) then the player from the server's point of view will be shooting where the target was not where he is.
Battlefield 2 half-arsedly introduced a constant offset into this system, set at 100ms for everyone, by which the server offsets all your commands backwards in time. This works great if your ping is 100ms, and generally makes things 100ms less annoying if not. This is the value the toolbox alters when you launch the game; using your actual ping to the server instead of the constant 100ms.
Half-life (and all associated engines: q2, q3a, hl2, hl, etc) do something entirely different: the server and clients agree on a shared, latency-adjusted idea of time. Each client timestamps their commands ('i shot over there at 1:31pm and 23.2 seconds') and the server then rolls back its view of the world to that time and sees if it the shots hit. In this way, people with high latency get a better game experience at the expense of those with lower latency. Those low pingers can now be well away from a confrontation when the server decides that the high pinger did, actually, kill you. Then you drop dead, seemingly at random. That's why half-life players hate those with low pings (it causes really weird shit and nasty gameplay). The meme has spread to Battlefield and other game engines where it simply does not apply.
Reply With Quote
Several people started to call for admins to kick this player because: "He was causing the lag".
This fired up a discussion between people who taught this was true and people who people taught this was a myth.
One of the hilarious quotes:
Doing some Googling, I found this thread with some explanation.
And I think this one covers it best:
It is indeed a myth on the Battlefield series of engines. The basic problem revolves around how to maintain a sane game world in many clients connected to one server over links of varying latencies.
The Battlefield series of engines does this by making clients connected with high latencies disadvantaged in that the server trusts its view of the world at all times. A client says 'i just shot in this direction' and the server checks if the shots hit something, and applies damage if so. Unfortunately if the client is out of date (because of a slow link) then the player from the server's point of view will be shooting where the target was not where he is.
Battlefield 2 half-arsedly introduced a constant offset into this system, set at 100ms for everyone, by which the server offsets all your commands backwards in time. This works great if your ping is 100ms, and generally makes things 100ms less annoying if not. This is the value the toolbox alters when you launch the game; using your actual ping to the server instead of the constant 100ms.
Half-life (and all associated engines: q2, q3a, hl2, hl, etc) do something entirely different: the server and clients agree on a shared, latency-adjusted idea of time. Each client timestamps their commands ('i shot over there at 1:31pm and 23.2 seconds') and the server then rolls back its view of the world to that time and sees if it the shots hit. In this way, people with high latency get a better game experience at the expense of those with lower latency. Those low pingers can now be well away from a confrontation when the server decides that the high pinger did, actually, kill you. Then you drop dead, seemingly at random. That's why half-life players hate those with low pings (it causes really weird shit and nasty gameplay). The meme has spread to Battlefield and other game engines where it simply does not apply.
Reply With Quote
