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Matrix-Style Bullet Time for Realtime Online Games

Posted by Zonk on from the leave-it-to-the-finns dept.

gcnaddict writes "Creating a slowdown in time on one end of an online game while maintaining normal speed on another was once one of those impossibilities which should never have happened. However, Finnish researchers have successfully invented a way to replicate a bullet-time-esque scene on one end of a real time multiplayer game without affecting the play speed on the other end(s). Of course, there are some slight issues which may never be resolved, such as when a player may occasionally think they have shot an opponent in a game and is surprised when his target refuses to die..."

5 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Head Hurts by FriedTurkey · · Score: 4, Funny

    My brain hurts trying to think of how this works.

  2. Oh, really? by pwrtool+45 · · Score: 5, Funny
    ...such as when a player may occasionally think they have shot an opponent in a game and is surprised when his target refuses to die..."
    This feature comes free with Comcast "Pure Broadband" Internet.
  3. LAG by CyberVenom · · Score: 3, Interesting

    just what we need. European-designer-lag. I get enough matrix-style lag already, thatnk-you-very-much. (If this is more than just smooth lag, somebody please explain it to me because I'm obviously missing something important...)

    On a side note, I had wondered if a space-time distortion bubble could be created in a multiplayer game. Sort of a local bubble of temporarily slowed time, which as the effect wears off, hyper-accelerates to catch up to the rest of the game world. The difference from lag there would be that all player within the bubble would experience the same slow time, and a player entering ot exiting the bubble would pass through an area of distorted time as they transition from one timeframe to the other... not sure what sort of paradoxes would have to be sidestepped to make this work right. any astrophysacists want to step in and take it from here?

    hmmm, I think I just described the Tokyo-Jupiter temporal distortion from Ra-Xaphan...

  4. Found the paper by Elkboy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Realizing Bullet Time Effect in Multiplayer Games with Local Perception Filters (PDF)

  5. Doesn't hit the core of the problem by James_Aguilar · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This method involves the introduction of excess latency to the system so that the player who is working in slow motion can be allowed to "catch up" to the server's actual state for as long as he is in bullet time. The problem with this method is twofold.

    First of all, there is the issue of lag in the standard game. Unless the server-side prediction is able to perfectly determine the paths of the slowed player, it will not be able to send an accurate picture of where that player is to his opponents. This will make a bullet-time'd player either invulnerable or just very difficult to damage. The other problem arises when a player is bullet-timing and kills another player. The player could perhaps be completely out of site from the bullet-timing player, but because his lagged position is still visible to the bullet-timing player, the hidden opponent could still be killed. The frustration this would add could never make up for the gameplay benefits of such a system.

    Some things are not merely hard, but impossible.