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Tim Willits Interview: Lead Doom3 Designer
Joe writes: "PlanetQuake3.net has a interview with id Software's Tim Willits who is the lead designer and project manager of Doom 3. Tim talks about the new generation of level editing in Doom3, his favorite maps of all time, how designers and coders work together, and many other subjects. One of the most interesting parts of the interview was this question: 'PlanetQuake3: Will it be possible to adjust the speed of the game for between single player and multiplayer play?' 'Tim Willits: Yes, most of the game logic is outside the main executable, this gives us great flexibility in changing basic game parameters between single and multiplayer.'"
you will *really* feel the lag now that doom3 is P2P. id seems to have digressed in terms of netcode performance since q1 and they are continuing that grand tradition into doom3.
Add to this the fact that most FPS fans seem to be intent on moving as FASTASPOSSIBLEATALLTIMES, since very few games reward you for being careful (Thief was one).
Prediction only works well for things that are, well, predictable! Large vehicles are great for this, because their ability to turn and change speed quickly is usually limited, hence a missed packet or three will cause a seeminly more abrupt change. RPG's take advantage of this because people generally move in a line, and it's seldom nescessary to follow someone exactly (they NEVER do traps very well, although maybe NWN does).
The golden rule though is that the server is always right. If your move-forward command didn't get there, you didn't move yet. If your screen shows you moving, it is lying to you. I think the client side should only predict ahead about 1 or 2 packet-times, and it should always smoothly correct paths and speeds accordingly.
Otherwise, things work as they do now, and anyone who constantly dodges in semi-random ways will appear to blit to different parts of the screen under all but the best latency conditions.
HINT to ID (and friends): Not everyone can get 80ms, and 2 packets lost puts the predictive code a good 250ms into badness.
Why not just play Quake1 then? Many opensource clients are available with various improvements. I suggest getting a Quakeworld client because it is simply Quake1 with an improved network protocol that allows for various levels of "prediction" in addition to simply being more efficient than the original Quake network protocol. In fact, in Quakeworld, you can set a prediction threshold known as pushlatency.
;-)
For example, "pushlatency 0" means that any lag above 0 miliseconds is lag you want to not have predicted. That is most likely what you are looking for. So you get an efficient network protocol, but the client doesn't try to hide the lag. "Pushlatency 0" is effectively "What You See Is What You Get". While "pushlantency -500" means that any lag above 500 miliseconds (half a second) is lag you want to not have predicted. Such a setting is useful for modem players that want a smooth feel, but still want to "feel" any extreme lag.
I still play Quakeworld regularly, and I usually have less than a 100ms ping, and I play with "pushlatency -2000". Such a setting basically says "give me full prediction and hide all my lag". If your lag goes above 2000ms, that means its been 2 minutes since your client has talked to the server. So with that lag, you most likely aren't connected to the server anymore
Seeing as Quake1 is still getting graphical improvements in addition to many other improvements, and add in the fact that it is opensource and inexpensive... why not just play quake 1? It has gameplay as good as or better than all of the other FPS games out there.
Absolutely. I play a lot of iCTF/iTDM/iFT and I'd rather rail against someone with a 20 ping than someone with 175 and high pl, because my reflexes are fast and when you shoot an lpb, he generally dies. HPB's sometimes aren't where their avatar is displayed, meaning you have to miss to hit them. Especially when they warp- then you have to guess.
The sad thing is, warping at least is 99% fixable. The big problems come when 1) players have their maxpackets+snaps+clpacketdup set too high, saturating their upload bandwidth, so the server doesn't receive the gameworld updates it expects, or 2) when players have very high packet loss and have a network card that implements packet caching, which confuses the Q3 engine by sending lost packets n+1 times when the server is expcting n=cl_packetdup. These are both problems which can be fixed with a little work or a $10 investment in hardware (or, sometimes, simply turning off packet caching in network card properties).
I have not yet found a n00b lagger whose lag was so bad that I couldn't make him stop warping with a little tweaking of network parameters, or in an extreme case, a new network card. Assuming his ping was under 400 or so, and he was willing to experiment (you would be surprised at how many laggers do it intentionally, esp at instagib servers). Not being hittable is a big advantage... especially when you play against good players, with >60% accuracy rates.
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been