4 ms·

Metal Slug on the PS4 was jarringly unresponsive compared to my expectations, though I'm not sure I've played it on an arcade machine in 20 years so maybe it's

Metal Slug on the PS4 was jarringly unresponsive compared to my expectations, though I'm not sure I've played it on an arcade machine in 20 years so maybe it's my memory or physiology at least partly to blame.

josephg 3y ago
Strangely enough, I had the same experience with diablo 4 until I turned down some of the graphics settings. I'm not sure if it was some DLSS / frame generation thing or what, but the game felt sloppy to me. Especially in comparison to something like diablo 2 which feels razor sharp. I wish modern game developers & graphics pipelines would spend more effort optimizing input latency. I'll stop noticing the graphics 2 minutes into playing the game. But if the input is laggy, I'll feel that the entire time I'm playing. And the feeling of everything being a bit laggy will linger long after I stop playing.
- alex7734 3y ago
  > But if the input is laggy, I'll feel that the entire time I'm playing. You've already bought the game at this point so most devs don't care.
  - josephg 3y ago
    They care a lot if they get bad reviews online. That translates directly into sales. An insane amount of money and effort that goes into most AAA games. It seems like a stretch to accuse the industry of not caring about the quality of the games they make.
    - alex7734 3y ago
      Well, yes, I explained myself horribly. What I meant is that most people are way more sensitive to graphics than anything else. A lot of people will never play a game that is ugly but don't seem to mind laggy inputs. There are a lot of games that, even without "real" input lag, have tons of animation dampening/inertia to the point that it makes them IMHO unresponsive, just to improve the "cinematic feel" and avoid characters instantly changing direction. If you prefer responsiveness to having the player character spin be perfectly smooth, well, sucks to be you, because prettier games sell better. Obviously this doesn't apply to fighting games or competitive shooters or anything like that where responsiveness is the point of the game.
      - dllthomas 3y ago
        Yeah, there's a lot of games where I don't care about lag. Donut County is a little drifty? Great, that fits the aesthetic. But some games really need to be tight.
      - josephg 3y ago
        > What I meant is that most people are way more sensitive to graphics than anything else. A lot of people will never play a game that is ugly but don't seem to mind laggy inputs. Maybe. I wouldn’t be surprised most people are much more sensitive to input latency than we think. But when there’s input latency, they have no idea that that’s the problem so instead they attribute the slushy feel of the game on something else. Or just don’t enjoy the game as much without knowing why. Game developers talk a lot about “game feel” and this is the kind of thing they’re talking about.
- pradn 3y ago
  I’m totally with you. It has a generic art style, and with optimized settings, looks like goop. There’s never going to be a game that feels like how it feels teleporting through a whole act in D2. Everything loads instantly. And it keeps doing that even at high cast speeds.
scott_w 3y ago
If I recall correctly, the PS4 controller has a disgusting amount of input delay. I noticed this most strongly on the FFX Remaster where you need to hit timer events before the arrow enters the shaded box. It doubly screws you in the chocobo racing section because the controls assume no delay, meaning you can’t respond to hazards in time and constantly overcorrect movement.
- masfuerte 3y ago
  Some multiplayer network games memoise the game state. When an input event arrives from a remote player it is applied to the game state that existed at the time of the event. Then the state is fast-forwarded to the present time and the game continues. Ideally you shouldn't notice this happening. The obvious fix for laggy input is to apply the same processing to local input, but I've not heard of anyone doing this. (I think this technique is known as netcode.)
  - rerdavies 3y ago
    Early versions of Android had this feature (Android 3-ish, 4-ish?) Touch events were run through a filter to predict where the touch position would be some number of frames in the future -- presumably to compensate for page-flipping delays. Not sure it made much difference, mostly because smooth animations on old versions of Android were extremely difficult because of inadequate CPUs/GPUs. The classes used to do predictive tracking don't seem to be used anymore in current best practice/current API sets.
  - scott_w 3y ago
    I think native PS4 games did something like this to work around it. Final Fantasy X was a PS2 game ported to PS4, so I doubt they re-wrote their controller code to that extent, especially given how noticeable it was.
mrob 3y ago
The Metal Slug games are already at a disadvantage because they run at 30fps, unusually low for arcade games. All else being equal, lower frame rate gives higher input latency.
dllthomas 3y ago
FWIW I took this impetus to check my TV settings, and poking around improved things. It's still not the arcade but it's better.

josephg 3y ago

Strangely enough, I had the same experience with diablo 4 until I turned down some of the graphics settings. I'm not sure if it was some DLSS / frame generation thing or what, but the game felt sloppy to me. Especially in comparison to something like diablo 2 which feels razor sharp. I wish modern game developers & graphics pipelines would spend more effort optimizing input latency. I'll stop noticing the graphics 2 minutes into playing the game. But if the input is laggy, I'll feel that the entire time I'm playing. And the feeling of everything being a bit laggy will linger long after I stop playing.

alex7734 3y ago
> But if the input is laggy, I'll feel that the entire time I'm playing. You've already bought the game at this point so most devs don't care.
- josephg 3y ago
  They care a lot if they get bad reviews online. That translates directly into sales. An insane amount of money and effort that goes into most AAA games. It seems like a stretch to accuse the industry of not caring about the quality of the games they make.
  - alex7734 3y ago
    Well, yes, I explained myself horribly. What I meant is that most people are way more sensitive to graphics than anything else. A lot of people will never play a game that is ugly but don't seem to mind laggy inputs. There are a lot of games that, even without "real" input lag, have tons of animation dampening/inertia to the point that it makes them IMHO unresponsive, just to improve the "cinematic feel" and avoid characters instantly changing direction. If you prefer responsiveness to having the player character spin be perfectly smooth, well, sucks to be you, because prettier games sell better. Obviously this doesn't apply to fighting games or competitive shooters or anything like that where responsiveness is the point of the game.
    - dllthomas 3y ago
      Yeah, there's a lot of games where I don't care about lag. Donut County is a little drifty? Great, that fits the aesthetic. But some games really need to be tight.
    - josephg 3y ago
      > What I meant is that most people are way more sensitive to graphics than anything else. A lot of people will never play a game that is ugly but don't seem to mind laggy inputs. Maybe. I wouldn’t be surprised most people are much more sensitive to input latency than we think. But when there’s input latency, they have no idea that that’s the problem so instead they attribute the slushy feel of the game on something else. Or just don’t enjoy the game as much without knowing why. Game developers talk a lot about “game feel” and this is the kind of thing they’re talking about.
pradn 3y ago
I’m totally with you. It has a generic art style, and with optimized settings, looks like goop. There’s never going to be a game that feels like how it feels teleporting through a whole act in D2. Everything loads instantly. And it keeps doing that even at high cast speeds.

scott_w 3y ago

If I recall correctly, the PS4 controller has a disgusting amount of input delay. I noticed this most strongly on the FFX Remaster where you need to hit timer events before the arrow enters the shaded box. It doubly screws you in the chocobo racing section because the controls assume no delay, meaning you can’t respond to hazards in time and constantly overcorrect movement.

masfuerte 3y ago
Some multiplayer network games memoise the game state. When an input event arrives from a remote player it is applied to the game state that existed at the time of the event. Then the state is fast-forwarded to the present time and the game continues. Ideally you shouldn't notice this happening. The obvious fix for laggy input is to apply the same processing to local input, but I've not heard of anyone doing this. (I think this technique is known as netcode.)
- rerdavies 3y ago
  Early versions of Android had this feature (Android 3-ish, 4-ish?) Touch events were run through a filter to predict where the touch position would be some number of frames in the future -- presumably to compensate for page-flipping delays. Not sure it made much difference, mostly because smooth animations on old versions of Android were extremely difficult because of inadequate CPUs/GPUs. The classes used to do predictive tracking don't seem to be used anymore in current best practice/current API sets.
- scott_w 3y ago
  I think native PS4 games did something like this to work around it. Final Fantasy X was a PS2 game ported to PS4, so I doubt they re-wrote their controller code to that extent, especially given how noticeable it was.

mrob 3y ago

The Metal Slug games are already at a disadvantage because they run at 30fps, unusually low for arcade games. All else being equal, lower frame rate gives higher input latency.

dllthomas 3y ago

FWIW I took this impetus to check my TV settings, and poking around improved things. It's still not the arcade but it's better.