How do fast paced multiplayer games like shooters and MMORPGs maintain fairly fluid combat when everyone can have differing network connection speeds?
In: Technology
Ping is the time it takes to get places, where as bandwidth is how much you can bring at a time. advertised internet speeds are in bandwidth, because ping depends on how far away whatever you’re connecting to is so is different for every single thing you try and do.
The amount of data you have to transmit for a game is super low. It’s like “I’m going here I fired a gun”. because of that Your bandwidth basically doesn’t matter much at all for gaming, it’s your ping.
Most “local” (within the same country) pings are between 20 and 250 ms. This is between 1/50th and 1/4 of a second. Often unnoticeably fast
Also games use predictive algorithms to show you what is probably going to happen – a running player can’t stop suddenly, so it shows them still moving. It will correct it within a fraction of a second if it’s wrong when it actually gets the new data. If you’ve ever seen someone standing in place or running into a wall then suddenly there in a new spot, this is an extreme version of that – the game is predicting they’re doing the same thing because it’s not getting that players data, then when it finally does get data it goes oh I was wrong!
Different games do different levels of prediction on the server versus on your computer that gets very complicated but that’s the basics
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