How do some games like Monster Hunter, or even mobile games like Underlords, allow for players all over the globe to play together seamlessly but other games like Dota has horrible lag and ping when you play outside your region?

Question

How do some games like Monster Hunter, or even mobile games like Underlords, allow for players all over the globe to play together seamlessly but other games like Dota has horrible lag and ping when you play outside your region?

In: Technology

Answer 1

I’m a fair way off the leading edge with game engines so I might be about to spout a load of crap, but …

There are two ways of making a multiplayer game. The easy way is for each player to report their ‘next tick’ location to a server which then forwards this information to every other player. This works reasonably well over a fast lan.

The hard way is to build an internal model of what’s going on inside each client. This way the game knows everything that’s going on, runs with a bunch of assumptions (the bullet continues going in a straight line), and then you only need to send updates to the other players when something unpredictable happens (the bullet hit someone). But writing one of these you need to accept that the event arrives *after* it has actually happened (very shortly after the gun was fired) and that you need to both change the model and apply some kind of time delta so everything comes back into sync. This is F for F’n hard.