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How Flight Sims Deal With Lag
mnemonic writes "How are hundreds of air, ground and sea units simulated in a multiplayer flight simulation with high fidelity, all the while maintaining a smooth framerate for dialup users? Two network protocols, a hybrid server-client peer to peer architecture (the latter of which is reportedly used by Doom 3) are only some of what it takes to keep Falcon 4.0, a beast of a game, playable online."
Of course, it could be as much as 500ms before that person dies, too (if both players have 250ms ping). The default for maxunlag used to be higher, too, which caused some really big problems (ie imagine 400ms + your ping between the time you duck behind the corner and the time you die).
It's a good idea in theory, but in practice it tends to just irritate players that have good connections (even though it really has the worst effect on the people that have pings closest to the maxunlag).
The biggest problem with it is simply that players can't react to the information on their screens (which is behind by their ping plus that of the player they're trying to react to). So, a sniper with high ping can be facing the completely wrong direction AND the target can duck around a corner and he'll still get hit by a sniper that was facing 90-180 degrees away from the target and around 1 or 2 corners.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
Which is why its optional (One of the few things Valve still lets admins control, bleh.)
Most people I've personaly seen complain about unlag don't understand it and are just trying to make an excuse for why my friend(who used to be on dialup) could ace their entire team. (obviously not refering to you, just most people I remember). Personaly I dont mind the occasionaly unlag kill so much as i hate when people have high choke and look like theyre flickering around, you just have to spray and pray while they can stop and aim.
The obvious solution to all of this is to lan, but overall I'd say halflife offers the best experience to dialup users.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
heh, before VAC came out, one of my CD keys (I have 3 for various reasons, primarily because Sierra gives free games to message board moderators, or at least they used to) was banned with no explanation. I think it might be because it was being used by someone else (I'm guessing a CD key generator got it right), and I eventually went into the registry and changed my key (to one of my other keys) because it was in use so often during clan matches and practices. Anyway, I reinstalled HL and accidentally used said key, only to find myself banned from the auth servers.
We used Punkbuster pretty heavily in TFC (I even ran a league for a while that used it from the start of the league's (short) life). Unfortunately, it had it's share of problems, but false positives were not high in my experience. We finally had to get rid of it when PB's developers stopped updating it for HL and it became very evident that it was easily hacked/bypassed by anyone that wanted to cheat.
If I had to pick an ideal time to get out, it would've been the first time I took a break from the game, when CE stopped playing TFC (and moved to CS for a while). The game was much better then, before the netcode update, the rampant cheating, and the general whining about how the game should or should not be played (god forbid I shoot incoming offense; I can understand 'play nice' rules in pub games, and even uphold and support them, but in matches?).
-PainKilleR-[CE]