the online delay issue..

[asskickulater]

if you watch oddbro's board, the game displays his hits quite a bit late. I think this has to do with lag, but isnt there a way to fix this? it is really killing to the online play, it dont jsut happen to oddbro.. it happens to a lot of people. just bringing this to your attention as i see this as soemthing that needs looked into.. perhaps you guys can find a way to minimize this effect.

[vandorb12]

I think the way that the console titles get around this is to have a bot "play" on the other's system. With that assumption, the computers only need to transmit where the player is in the song, when somebody misses, when somebody "whammies" (and how they whammy), and when somebody activates their multiplier. I'm not too sure about fret positions, but that can be easily figured out by watching game plays.

[Gyoo]

May 1, 2012 2:00:39 GMT vandorb12 said:

I think the way that the console titles get around this is to have a bot "play" on the other's system. With that assumption, the computers only need to transmit where the player is in the song, when somebody misses, when somebody "whammies" (and how they whammy), and when somebody activates their multiplier. I'm not too sure about fret positions, but that can be easily figured out by watching game plays.

That's what is made on GH games, and it works pretty well

[knapman [FD]]

this is basically what we do already, its impossible to have a flawless game with lag and really what we have set was the best of the bad options we have available when it comes to handling lag, online play shouldn't be killed due to this at all, all the essentials are accounted for accurately, its only a visual preview on the remote end that sees the delay so everyone can play fine, people just need to be realistic about what their connection can actually handle

you could have more aggressive prediction on the bot side but it would be making constant corrections that would have its own set of glitches and likely more obvious ones, such as missed notes reappearing, or just ignored completely so the meters are jumping around and not reflecting what you see on the board, our setup you just get accurate feedback, with a delay if your connection isn't good, and on low latency you'll get a near perfect result

When we were first working on the system we did throw around the idea of simply blocking people with high lag from playing with each other or region locking, this is what many mainstream games would do with their matchmaking systems, so the delay would never be that great, but it seemed preferable to allow people to play with some visual glitching as long as the core gameplay still worked, blocking would solve the delay issue but i think most people would prefer to just be able to play and have the choice to put up with a delay rather than just locked out completely

One tweak i believe we could make is for the game to show high latency remote players with a reduced board speed, the slower the board moves the less apparent the delay will be so if we can detect bad connections and compensate in this way it will give a better result all round

also worth noting if your just playing with two of you, you should be avoiding using someone elses dedicated server or your likely adding lag to your game for nothing

and in the case of the mainstream games, they have a larger player base, so the game can find players local to you improving the chances of a low latency game, this is simply a benefit from having more people playing and not something we can fix in the net code

[David]

As Knapman said we had considered this right at the start but there are just basic flaws with doing it. An obvious one is if the bot is predicting then you may have someone miss the last note of a PS section and the bot predicts they will hit it. Taking SP back off someone will just confuse the game play. The downside to this version is that it looks bad when watching on a recorded video. The Upside is it don't distract you when playing. Hopefully when more people are playing you will just join a game that has a low ping. Right now people are playing eachother from all over the place and expecting it to be perfect. No games are perfect online and aslong as it don't effect the final scores of the game then I don't think it's a issue that requires much attention.

Thanks
David