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Lag: How does it work?

Discussion in 'Help' started by Mersau1t, Jan 6, 2016.

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Mods: makmoud98, Mazey
  1. Mersau1t

    Mersau1t Catapult Fodder

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    I made sure to look around to see if there was some sort of already existing thread comparable to this one. I couldn't find one after searching around, but if there is already one like this, or if this topic belongs in another part of the forum, I am sorry to have created more work for the moderators and users.

    I frequently find myself in games where one or more players experience lag at specific moments, due to what I have heard called "ladder spam" (placing many ladders at once in an attempt to cause lag). I have also been in games where all players experienced lag not caused by too many particles appearing at once, where it simply seemed to be strain on the server. I have also encountered players with ping counts that appear to dance from one to another, and usually these players seem to cause other players to see them teleporting around. I have seen players become furious with others over their apparent immunity to being hit, while those same players seem to not have any ill effects of lag at all. If one player with 33 ping in a room of people with 200 ping can't hit or see anyone moving, is it his connection, or their latency?

    I would like to ask the more mechanically minded and experienced players here what exactly are the causes of these different kinds of phenemenon; is there, in fact, a common cause for each of these symptoms? What is "Lag"? If someone's internet causes them to be impossible to play with, should they get better internet or stop? Can one player with 500 ping make the game actually unplayable for another? Thanks very much for your time, if you would like me to document more specific instances, or narrow the question down, please let me know!
     
    SirDangalang and MadRaccoon like this.
  2. Generally speaking, the higher the ping, the less fine control a player has over their movements. Most games attempt to compensate for ping; this can result in a more playable experience for the lagger, though of course it may cause other players to miss them or them to miss players.

    Ideally, a player with low ping, say, <33 has an advantage over higher ping players, as they're able to react in a much shorter time. That said, a player who is lagging might avoid a hit or land a hit they wouldn't if they were not lagging.

    I'm not terribly familiar with the mechanics of game networking besides what the average player knows, though; so take it with a grain of salt. Most servers have a maximum ping amount to avoid slowing down the server's response times.
     
    EhRa likes this.
  3. Geti

    Geti Please avoid PMing me (poke a mod instead) THD Team Administrator Global Moderator

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    There's no general solution in any game when it comes to lag compensation of any kind.

    There's 3 major forms of lag:
    • Local/Framerate/CPU/GPU lag - basically something in the local machine cant keep up with what the game is throwing at it, so the player sees a drop in framerate. There are different ways of dealing with this; the game may make "bigger steps", or it might "slow down", or it might skip rendering frames, or all manner of things. The only way to improve this is to throw more hardware at it, or optimise the game (which can only be done so much practically at this point).
    • Network Bandwidth/Packet Loss Lag - the player's network cant keep up with the amount of incoming data - unless it is a temporary burst from something like 1000 bombs being spawned (they'll be gone soon), they'll never catch up and eventually disconnect. This is more commonly caused by something else (eg youtube) saturating the network and taking bandwidth away from the game. Packet loss (bad connection) can make this worse (as packets have to be re-sent, taking more of the precious bandwidth).
    • Network Ping Lag - the player is situated a long way from the server and it takes a long time for communication to get back and forward. Generally <100ms is ok/good ping, >300 is borderline unplayable ping. This will cause a flat delay between the player doing something and it showing up on the server (and then depending on the other player's ping, showing up on their machines), and is the general reason that playing over the internet can never be perfect. This can cause things like players being "on the wrong side" of each other on each machine, which causes both of them to "push/pull" the other one - or, if all of the state is kept on the server, causes that annoying "rubber banding" when you go around a corner too tightly or collide with another player.
    As to the "ethics" of joining with ping; sometimes you have no choice. If there's a game closer to you with players, you should in general prefer it - for everyone's sake! If not, imo it's fine to play with some lag. The people complaining about your lag don't know the half of it, it sucks much more to be lagging than to be playing with someone laggy.

    Hope this helped :)
     
  4. Mersau1t

    Mersau1t Catapult Fodder

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    Thanks very much for the specific clarification, this helped a lot!
     
  5. Asu

    Asu THD Team THD Team Forum Moderator

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    Another kind of "lag", but that is a little different from the others : Server overloading.
    In this case everyone is affected. Symptoms of this are tomato bombs (i.e. bombs that seem to take like 15 seconds to blow up while they already should be blowing), lack of responsiveness on builder controls and some actions being delayed randomly.
    Usually this is due to too much people being logged on or heavy mods (also low-end servers running on cheap VPSes for example).
     
    Mersau1t likes this.
  6. Geti

    Geti Please avoid PMing me (poke a mod instead) THD Team Administrator Global Moderator

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    In the case above, this is the server experiencing the "CPU lag" rather than some new kind of lag, but you're right that it shows up as very strange things for the client.
     
    Mersau1t and Asu like this.
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