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Neuro-Reckoning May Reduce MMOG Time Lag
Hugh Pickens writes "Time lag can cause some very strange behavior in massively multiplayer online games when players' actions onscreen become slow and jerky. New techniques are on the way to reduce the problem of lag time in MMOGs when a player's computer can't keep up with changes in a shared online world. Games like Quake use a technique called dead reckoning and while traditional dead-reckoning systems that assume that a game character will maintain the velocity and direction that it has at the moment an update is sent to all other participating computers; dead reckoning works best for movement and shooting and less well for erratic actions such as interacting with objects or with other players. Read the abstract of new technique called 'neuro-reckoning' that may improve the predictive process by installing a neural network in each player's computer to predict fast, jerky actions."
... if the Neural net can predict my next move, just let it make it for me. Send my bot out to farm Karazhan for me while I watch the hockey game. Oh wait...
According to the abstract anyway, "Our proposed neuro-reckoning framework exhibits low computational resource overhead for real-time use..."
Twelve years ago I had a Pentium 60Mhz that could barely play MP3s without skipping. CPU architecture improvement and especially multi-core processing would probably leave plenty of room for short scale neural network movement prediction.