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Investor Money Goes To Magic Lag Reducing Tech
Gamasutra reports on Texas technology company Bigfoot networks, which just received a $4 Million investment to develop a lag-reducing hardware PC card. From the piece: "According to the firm, it will bring to market the world's first Gaming Network Accelerator card, which will allow online gamers to play their favorite games with less lag. The company explained: 'Lag is the number one problem in online video games today, and Bigfoot Networks is the only company in the world whose sole mission is to fight lag', but gave no specific technical explanation about how it intends to do this." Greg Costikyan spells it out on the Games*Design*Art*Culture blog: "So yes, there might be a business here. But if so, it will be a business built largely on bullshit."
Honestly, I don't see how user-side hardware (or software, for that matter) can reduce online activity lag. Sure, you might try to implement some sort of protocol that evens out the lag a bit by pulling excessive amount of data when 'lag is low' and use it to fill in the gaps when 'lag is high' - but that'd require a certain, no small, amount of heuristics and second-guessing. I'm certain many of early MMO veterans remember the ancient lag issues from the times of real-time simulations - fast ones in particular, such as flight simulators, suffered tremendously from lag-related issues such as phantom opponents (where your 'second guessing' lag-compensators assumed that opponent would continue in a straight line or at the same turn radius/speed, whereas he actually went into some wild maneuver). In the current state of affairs, I'm honestly not sure how much, if any, of the lag in your average MMO is user/connection-side and thus corrigible; games such as World of Warcraft, City of Heroes and Battlefield 2 are actually playable over dial-up - the trickle of packages isn't a lot of challenge even for a stable 56k modem. The bottleneck of modern day MMOs seem to be game servers going slightly ballistic when a certain area gets swarmed by a large number of active player objects (think Ironforge in WoW or Atlas Park in CoH) and therein lies the catch... how do you expect client-side hardware to correct server-side problems?
'...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons...' Popular Mechanics, 03/49'
This isn't any different than the phantom console, magnets which supposedly help your arthritis or whatever book that Kevin Trudeau is bilking people into buying claiming this is information that the government doesn't want you to know about.
This shouldn't surprise anyone. Not the least of which that there are VC idiots who will gladly pony up the money for a non-existant, never-to-be-made product simply because it has oodles of neat sounding words in its description.
*PT Barnum never actually said those words but people routinely attribute the phrase to him.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I guess it was just a matter of time before something like this appeared.. The hi-fi industry has cables and magic boxes all over the place, now we get magic hardware.. I'm VERY curious to how they plan to eliminate lag introduced by routers that they have no control over. Not to completely blow them off, but I'm not holding my breath. Seeing is believing.
I have a semi-decent 5.1 surround setup, and have avoided expensive cables because I simply don't believe in it. Audio cables might benefit from better shielding and low capacitance wiring, but digital signals.. come on man. A bit across the wire that's "worn in the edges" is still a bit, unlike a sound wave.
Analyzing the connection? How do you propose that happens, I doubt anyone is using a protocol for their online game which is so complicated that it has routing functionality built into it at the application level. Also there would have to be a choice of different servers available, and usually (for MMO's at least) people choose their general area in the world, and I think most game services worth their salt then try and find a server for the client to play on which has relatively low latency. When it comes to "analyzing the connection", I think people just have to rely on the internet to do their routing, and a client machine with one gateway pretty much doesn't have much choice besides their one gateway with regards where to send the packets.