Your move, sucker! Microsoft tests cloud gaming system that cuts through network lag Microsoft researchers have developed software that, they say, cuts through network delay issues in cloud gaming systems. The tech, dubbed "DeLorean", speculates what a gamer will do next, renders those frames and then pushes them out to the client "one entire RTT [round-trip delay time] ahead of time". Redmond's researchers …
Presumably if the algorithm fails and you do something different, it doesn't display the now incorrect frame and you revert to having slightly greater latency for a brief moment. It's not playing the game for you, it's just planning ahead. A little like the pre-fetch of pages a browser will do where a human takes valuable time moving the mouse around and thinking so the browser pre-fetches the pages that various links on the current page point to. Only in this case it's significantly more sophisticated.
I used to be able to have my friends over, plug everyone into the same switch and away we went. Today, the LAN party option is not in the majority of games and they force you to use the Internet (Even if all PC's are on the same switch) so they can spy on you.
Have an option where the highest lagged PC sets an artificial lag for all players. If I'm 250 ms then everyone is. Level playing field.
@ AC
Umm how about autokicking anybody with ping above 100 I love having a ping of around 16 on servers i pick.
Give us back server browsers and allow us to make our own choices, not this shitty join random game with random people in random location on the earth.
Not saying take it out, but dont force it as the only option !
You know that Wow have timers on most skills exactly because of that.
Now try playing Ragnarok Online, that is pretty much a twitch game with no timer on skills, and feel the lag bogging you down. The game is accurate to a 20ms lag, which means someone with low lag can hit you 10 times before you can react, if you are playing on a 200ms lag. Have fun dying repeatedly. They grew better lately, and are adding timers to skills as well.
And to cut through lag, people use proper proxy servers with dedicated gaming QoS, eg, if a packet is detected to belong to a game, it gets first priority, even over VoIP. It is easy to find their services, won't advertise.
You can always play Diablo 3 on the PS3 with 4 controllers (hence 4 people), just in case.
Amen to that.
Sunday evenings are LAN parties for my friends and I - we like PC games that
a) have a LAN-only mode (no connecting to the Internet if all hosts are on the same subnet), and
b) have a co-op mode against bots - I want to play alongside my friends, not against them.
Sadly, all the modern games are of the "play against random potty-mouthed 10-year-olds in France" variety, so we're STILL playing Age of Mythology and Battlefield 1942 - ancient games that are increasingly flaky on modern hardware. I refuse to get a console and have an aversion to Steam/Origin type spyware.
Segueing slightly off the topic of this article, can any Reg readers suggest suitable modern replacements that meet my criteria?
Given the sheer amount of possibilities in anything but the most trivial of games, this is likely to not help very much.
Think about it - with mouse-movement and a forward key, just how many different places can you end up in within even 100ms? And how many of those would let you die or give you a near-miss if you were to fire / someone was to fire at you? We're talking vast amounts of calculations for something which is literally down-to-the-pixel at affecting the next few hundred milliseconds of the game (and if you weren't alive, but shot, you have to predict the rest of the gamefield based on both a bullet here, there, over there and nowhere at all, all at the same time, before the player's "real" input comes in over the wire.
Can't imagine it will help except in the contrived games (something like Bomberman?) or consoles (where input ranges are limited and stepped).
I doubt this is meant as a complete substitute for local rendering. More of a help for it. Additionally, I bet the marketing wankers at Microsoft will tell us that any side-effects from this are actually a feature. Excessive blur? That's only DoF! Not always 100% precise control of the player character's movements? Well, you can't 100% control you body, too! I already feel the rage.
John Carmack did that already for Quake 2 and in Quake 3 he greatly improved it. There are many papers well described on how he did it and that's exactly what this framework seems to help doing: predicting the game state (extrapolation in simple cases), and reconciling with the server's response (interpolation in simple cases). Obviously for headshots you should avoid predicting them as successful to avoid reconciling a dead body with a living man shooting at you (i.e., you usually see the heat hit animation but the blood splash and dead animation is triggered only after the server confirmed).
And yea, that's nearly 20 years ago now!!! Thank Carmack for opening your document, even years ago.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
