I’ve been thinking about this lately. I guess it just doesn’t make sense to me that 40 years ago we were barely able to move pixels across a screen and now there are games where even hundreds of people can play games like first person shooters on servers simultaneously where reactions down to the millisecond commonly decide the outcome of a game. How can we match the inputs of everyone and have them appear on someone else’s screen? Is it simply that information travels at the speed of light and we are really good at organizing it?
In: 20
Two factors: one, a lot of that information is, literally, travelling at the speed of light through fiber optic internet cables. two, most games employ some prediction technology to compensate for the “lag” (lag is the time it takes for the signal to be encoded, travel time, decoded, and for the game server to think about what to do)
so often you are really shooting at the “prediction” of where the server thinks your enemy might be in the future (because it takes time as well for the server to send you information) and at the same time the predicted events are checked vs the actual input from the players and carefully updated.. this may cause a player to teleport, may cause hit registration errors, etc, but playing WITHOUT any lag compensation has it’s own suite of issues
the exact details of how lag is compensated varies from game to game
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