5 ms·

I don't disagree with you, but there is multi-ms latency typically in local setups as well, so certainly some latency must be tolerated by basically all the gam

by Maakuth 10y ago

I don't disagree with you, but there is multi-ms latency typically in local setups as well, so certainly some latency must be tolerated by basically all the games. Carmack had an interesting point about this: http://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-faster-than-sending-a-pixel-to-the-screen http://superuser.com/questions/419070/transatlantic-ping-fas...

vvanders 10y ago
Sure, but as they allude to in that article local latency is consistent(dropping a frame in games is considered a cardinal sin for anything competitive). Game design is built with these latencies into account, if people were to see the raw network updates they'd be shocked at how jerky and unplayable it is. Generally if you're building a game to be tolerant of network latency you want a design where you're trying to be predictive than reactive. The former tolerates latency well since you're trying to guess where something will be in the future. The latter has latency in the feedback loop which is incredibly painful without some complex(time-rewind) mitigation measures.
- paulhodge 10y ago
  The games you're talking about (competitive games, games where 1 frame drop is unacceptable) are a very small & niche part of the market. Look specifically at modern consoles- every console has builtin architecture that leads to a minimum input latency of 67ms. The game can add more latency (and most do), and a lot of popular TVs add more latency on top of that. Here's a database of game input latencies, it shows that even a lot of successful games have latencies of above 100ms: http://www.displaylag.com/video-game-input-lag-database/ http://www.displaylag.com/video-game-input-lag-database/ So if you're talking about the "highly latency sensitive" players, then by definition those are only PC gamers, and only a small fraction of those players. The addressable market of gamers who tolerate 100+ ms of latency is very large, definitely large enough to build a business on top of.
  - vvanders 10y ago
    So the point I was making(and a little poorly on re-reading) is that latency is fine up to a point(about 200ms) as long as it's consistent with no jitter. Input systems -> rendering fall under that category, you don't have your TV dropping frames or delivering them late. You can adjust for a constant latency and "lead" it, which is why game design that's predictive works so well in multiplayer. Latency sensitive players are actually large part of the market, any action based multiplayer game will fall under that category, which includes FPS games which make up a large portion of game revenue. About 10% of the market makes 90% of the revenue so missing certain use cases excludes a large chunk.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      The normal packet jitter on my connection is between 2 and 20 milliseconds. You could stream games to me with a fixed network delay of 120ms (plus 80ms for input/rendering) and there wouldn't be dropped or late frames.
      - vvanders 10y ago
        > normal packet jitter What's the 99th percentile for that? How about packet-loss? None of this is new stuff in gamedev, we've been build action games successfully since the days of 28.8 modems and 200ms pings. Maybe that makes me a bit of an entrenched player(which is a poor position to argue on HN) but I've yet to see anything fundamental in these technologies that will address the latency issues in the same way you can with an interpolated client-side simulation.
        Dylan16807 10y ago
        Checking this ping I have open, the 99th percentile jitter is less than 20ms, and packet loss is about .2% It doesn't have to be as good, it just has to reach a certain level. And for a lot of games it works fine to have a bit of lead time on controls.
      - Mithaldu 10y ago
Mithaldu 10y ago
You know what, there can be long and drawn-out arguments about this, or we test it. I've been wanting to give this one a real try: http://store.steampowered.com/app/369530/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/369530/ Sadly my laptop sucks too much for it. It can run it at ~40-60 fps, but i really feel the input latency already. I'll try and see what it feels like with their AWS AMI, playing on a 25mbit line from hannover, to an EC2 instance in Frankfurt. Edit: Turns out there's an issue with my laptop hardware, so results from me will be delayed until a fix can be found.

by Maakuth 10y ago

vvanders 10y ago

Sure, but as they allude to in that article local latency is consistent(dropping a frame in games is considered a cardinal sin for anything competitive). Game design is built with these latencies into account, if people were to see the raw network updates they'd be shocked at how jerky and unplayable it is. Generally if you're building a game to be tolerant of network latency you want a design where you're trying to be predictive than reactive. The former tolerates latency well since you're trying to guess where something will be in the future. The latter has latency in the feedback loop which is incredibly painful without some complex(time-rewind) mitigation measures.

paulhodge 10y ago
The games you're talking about (competitive games, games where 1 frame drop is unacceptable) are a very small & niche part of the market. Look specifically at modern consoles- every console has builtin architecture that leads to a minimum input latency of 67ms. The game can add more latency (and most do), and a lot of popular TVs add more latency on top of that. Here's a database of game input latencies, it shows that even a lot of successful games have latencies of above 100ms: http://www.displaylag.com/video-game-input-lag-database/ http://www.displaylag.com/video-game-input-lag-database/ So if you're talking about the "highly latency sensitive" players, then by definition those are only PC gamers, and only a small fraction of those players. The addressable market of gamers who tolerate 100+ ms of latency is very large, definitely large enough to build a business on top of.
- vvanders 10y ago
  So the point I was making(and a little poorly on re-reading) is that latency is fine up to a point(about 200ms) as long as it's consistent with no jitter. Input systems -> rendering fall under that category, you don't have your TV dropping frames or delivering them late. You can adjust for a constant latency and "lead" it, which is why game design that's predictive works so well in multiplayer. Latency sensitive players are actually large part of the market, any action based multiplayer game will fall under that category, which includes FPS games which make up a large portion of game revenue. About 10% of the market makes 90% of the revenue so missing certain use cases excludes a large chunk.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    The normal packet jitter on my connection is between 2 and 20 milliseconds. You could stream games to me with a fixed network delay of 120ms (plus 80ms for input/rendering) and there wouldn't be dropped or late frames.
    - vvanders 10y ago
      > normal packet jitter What's the 99th percentile for that? How about packet-loss? None of this is new stuff in gamedev, we've been build action games successfully since the days of 28.8 modems and 200ms pings. Maybe that makes me a bit of an entrenched player(which is a poor position to argue on HN) but I've yet to see anything fundamental in these technologies that will address the latency issues in the same way you can with an interpolated client-side simulation.
      - Dylan16807 10y ago
        Checking this ping I have open, the 99th percentile jitter is less than 20ms, and packet loss is about .2% It doesn't have to be as good, it just has to reach a certain level. And for a lot of games it works fine to have a bit of lead time on controls.
    - Mithaldu 10y ago

Mithaldu 10y ago

You know what, there can be long and drawn-out arguments about this, or we test it. I've been wanting to give this one a real try: http://store.steampowered.com/app/369530/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/369530/ Sadly my laptop sucks too much for it. It can run it at ~40-60 fps, but i really feel the input latency already. I'll try and see what it feels like with their AWS AMI, playing on a 25mbit line from hannover, to an EC2 instance in Frankfurt. Edit: Turns out there's an issue with my laptop hardware, so results from me will be delayed until a fix can be found.