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What is lag?... Exactly?


zombitroid

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Is bad hit detection considered to be lag? Or is "He saw me before I saw him" considered to be lag?

 

When I am playing, I usually have good hit detection, but even when my ping is 40 ms, I still, when I die in AW, get the feeling that they saw me long before I saw them. Its almost as if they see me, pull up their gun, shoot me, kill me, and start sprinting again all in one quick second!!!! IS THAT UNBELIEVABLE OR WHAT?!!! LOL Am I a lost sheep or do others feel this way?

 

I love this forum.

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Lag, from in-game:  The delay between you taking an action, and the server registering that action.  So, in essence, you could do something, and someone else could do something.  Even if you did something before the other person, differences in lag may mean that the server thinks that the other person performed their action before you performed yours.

 

Lag, from a network perspective, per-packet:  The delay between a packet being put on the wire on one end of a connection, and the packet being received at the other end.

 

Lag, from a network perspective, flow-based: The average delay between a packet being put on the wire on one end of a connection, and the packet being received at the other end.

 

Lag, from a physics perspective: The delay between a photon escaping the Sun and that photon arriving at Earth (roughly 8 minutes).77777777777777

 

At whatever level it's examined, it's the time between one entity doing something and another entity acknowledging that something has been done.

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  • Netduma Staff

I would consider lag when I'm physically skipping. I've heard people say that they've had games with the worst lag they've ever had then seen the gameplay and it's just a few bullets not registering. I would consider bad bullet reg and lag to be completely different. For me, lag has to be some sort of skipping on the screen.

 

This is probably not what you wanted, but if you want a proper description of lag, then Iain wrote this which explains it well :)

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Yes i agree with Crossy I call lagging when I or other players are glitching on screen.

 

They have smoothed this out since mw2 so you do not notice it, so player could be teleporting.

 

I always think that when a player comes towards you head on the are easier to kill than running across a road because half the time their hit boxes seem to disapear and take more bullets to kill but because of the the smoothing you do not see the avatar disapear like they used to back in mw/mw2 days.

 

I much prefer being able to see a lagger.

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imo there is some very wonky timing coding going on in this game, dedicated servers for me on charter run around 60ms of what I'll call timing lag if you will, note the ping can be good and stable to the server but the in game timing is waaaaaay off. Now if you go into a player hosted lobby that has a fairly stable connection with lets say no higher than 80ms ping in game timing is spot ON. This has been the case for me anyway and I play aw on ps3 ps4 and x360 all with exact same results daily. I'm guessing either some kind of net code issue or all the deds are on some different planet then charters towers and the ping is lying to us lol.

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imo there is some very wonky timing coding going on in this game, dedicated servers for me on charter run around 60ms of what I'll call timing lag if you will, note the ping can be good and stable to the server but the in game timing is waaaaaay off. Now if you go into a player hosted lobby that has a fairly stable connection with lets say no higher than 80ms ping in game timing is spot ON. This has been the case for me anyway and I play aw on ps3 ps4 and x360 all with exact same results daily. I'm guessing either some kind of net code issue or all the deds are on some different planet then charters towers and the ping is lying to us lol.

very interesting, I cant wait to get a player host!! I always get a dedi!!!

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imo there is some very wonky timing coding going on in this game, dedicated servers for me on charter run around 60ms of what I'll call timing lag if you will, note the ping can be good and stable to the server but the in game timing is waaaaaay off. Now if you go into a player hosted lobby that has a fairly stable connection with lets say no higher than 80ms ping in game timing is spot ON. This has been the case for me anyway and I play aw on ps3 ps4 and x360 all with exact same results daily. I'm guessing either some kind of net code issue or all the deds are on some different planet then charters towers and the ping is lying to us lol.

 

OvenBakedMuffin (Youtube) has visual evidence there is an inherent in-game latency between when you do something and when it is registered not only on your end, but on another player's end, and... This is on a closed LAN environment. Add packet loss, jitter, bad internet infrastructure, number of hops, general traffic congestion and you can see how AW is nowhere near a competitive game.

 

The main problem with playing games online is many of them use what is called client side interpolation... Including the CoD series. This means things happen on your end that may not actually be happening on the server. This is part of the whole "smoothing" process mentioned above.

 

In the days of 56K dial-up, some games had no lag compensation / interpolation, so you had to shoot either in front of (lead targets), or behind targets to accurately hit them. You can see how frustrating this was. Thus, client side interpolation was created to try and sync the player's POV at the expense of accuracy. On some engines like Valve's Source engine, you have the option of turning this interpolation off via cvar console commands. Your game will appear to be very choppy, but it will be an accurate representation of what is going on the server. You will have to either lead or "lag" behind your target to register a kill. This is because the server is having to do all the calculations in real time... versus a ms delayed, but smooth client side... But it is as close to real time gaming over long distances we are going to get until we break the speed of light barrier a.k.a. Quantum Physics.

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I know it sounds stupid but I agree with all the statements above describing lag as they are in play when it comes to it.There are so many variables when it comes to causing lag that I don't think anyone will ever figure out "the best way to prevent or minimize it" or maybe not even what causes it as again IMO way to many variables.And like JConnor said there is still latency on LAN,I still think part of it is camera angles but again it's the wonderful world of variables...

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