LAG! What is it good for? Absolutely, nothing!

porgie

Will there ever come a day when there is no lag?  I know it takes time for a message to get from point A to B, but that being said is there anything being done to fix the mechanics of the Internet so that lag is someday at it's barest minimum?



Another thing I don't understand.  I play lot's of MMO's.  Some games have more lag than others.  I understand the concept of where the server is, the trip that packets have to take, blah blah blah.  But still, some games lag horrendously.  I play on a west coast server in WoW and I live in Texas.  It's about the same distance from my house to west coast as the east coast.  Yet when I play DAoC, there are times when it is nearly unplayable.  And yes, I have a good enough system, trust me. 



There has to be something going on.  Is it the programming that does it?  Or is it the Internet as a whole?  And are the game developers coming up with ways to make up for the lag so that gameplay is more or less fair?



And, like I asked earlier, what's being done about lag on the Internet side?  Are there new technologies being developed?  Or are they already here but the logistics of putting them in place is just too overwhelming?

ianubisi

"Lag" is a horribly abused term.

Most "lag" that gamers complain about in MMOGs has to do with video framerate slowdown. Internet latency as an issue is relatively rare.

But the true answer to your question is that the very nature of the internet will always guarantee that there will be lag. The internet was designed as a network capable of withstanding a nuclear strike against multiple high-profile targets and still allowing critical infrastructure to communicate. To do so it must constantly allow distribution of requests across any number of chokepoints. Router protocols attempt to find the "fastest" way from A to Z but each point it touches will make similar decisions and packets sometimes get routed in some bizarre circles.

To circumvent this issue, and thus remove network latency ("lag") as an issue, you would have to have dedicated networks that don't oversubscribe capacity. I don't know if this is ever going to happen in a large commercial sense, especially because most users in the marketplace simply aren't impacted by this issue yet. Right now, 3MB DSL/Cable connections are far more than most people need, though I can definitely envison video-on-demand services making current connectivity a joke.

The biggest problem you're always going to face in a game with hundreds of people connected at the same time has more to do with internal messaging than anything else. You have to keep in mind that every single thing in a MMOG...the players, the NPCs, the objects...communicates a large amount of detail to everything else in its range of visibility. When 10 people meet in a small area there is a horde of information flying back and forth between each of the objects...and all that data, to some degree or another...is making its way to each of those 10 people's machines. If you change your orientation, or move, or change your weapon, or do *anything* that's a whole new round of detail that has to go out to the server and every one of the other 9 player's machines. The amount of messaging traffic handled by the server is astronomical.

Divorce yourself from the concept of the connection as being the sore spot. This matters a little bit for Counterstrike or RTS games where every fraction of a second counts. But in MMOGs that major issue you're facing as relates to lag has a lot more to do with texture mapping and messaging. Your video card and the sheer quantity of "things" on the screen (even invisible things) taxes your machine and the server something fierce.

DuraheLL

whoever invented lag, should be roadkilled. it's about as useful as "egg-cups" >_<

rob1101

well to answer you question, "will there ever be no lag" who knows? we will always be making technological advances and with that everything will improve. if your system is to par, and the game programing is fine. then it is just the internet slowing you down because of the other players and such. it really just depends on the game then. try going back a few years and play an online game that was designed for 56k only, granted that if everyone was using DSL (and had a good system) there would be no lag.

bainster

Just as a matter of clarity before I weight in on this discussion.



what do you see as laggy latency



> 50ms

> 100ms

> 300ms

>1000ms



Please bear with me as I ask this ..

roflingemo

Lag is just as common as oxygen. On the internet you are connecting to different servers, sending and receiving information. Since these servers usually have other people sending and receive information the server has to do all the sending/receiving to all the users. Now, this slows things down. Plus, it also takes time for your computer to process the information/data then contact the server, then send it. This is why sometimes games have servers in the west/east and all over the world. The closer you are to the server you are connecting to, the faster it'll be. I know CounterStrike isn't an MMO, but it is a great example of "Lag". People complain about "lag" all the time on CS and other games, the truth is... it's not lag, since lag exists no matter; all it is, is either your computer slowing down because lack of processing, or the server is backed up with information.



The question you asked "Will there ever be NO lag?" The answer - depends.

Generally you can't escape lag, but while technology increases almost every month/year, we might be able to pull off an absolute minimal lag server. Now, this would require maximum processing capabilities, but also require a great great great internet connection. Then, even if we got all the things, it'd depend on how your computer can handle it.



Say example you have a super-server that can handle 10,000 people no lag, has like T3 connections, processors that'd blow anyone's mind, what if the computer connecting was a $200 dell on dial-up? That'd for sure as hell slow things down; maybe not a lot, but it could.





~the rofling emo

gnomexxx

"Lag" is what killed me on the whole PvP experience.  I think any chance of me ever enjoying PvP was stripped away when I found it hard to even click on the player I wanted to attack.  And other than clicking on them, every other method of targeting a person is too awkward. 



I could probably enjoy PvP someday when lag is not an issue, but for now I'm sticking with good ol PvE.

Produde

There's some very good input here but there is another part of the internet not mentioned that is more at fault for 'lag' than anything.

Your ISP....

I rarely experience "lag" and I do not have an UBER PC. Usually I experience "lag" in any game right after a major patch or update or during times when an MMO is changing severs. Otherwise I can't complain.

If I do experience "lag" for more than 2 days running I clean up my HDD and defrag.....

Believe it or not

 

Nyast

There will always be a minimum amount of lag ( network latency ).



Think about it: our technology is and will stay limited by the time it takes for the information to travel: light speed.



Think light speed is unrelevant to this discussion, because it's too fast anyway ? Think again.



Light speed is 300K Km/sec; let's assume the worst case, two computers separated by 20K Km ( USA vs Asia for example ). A network packet sent and coming back will then have to travel a distance of 40K Km; at light speed that's roughly 133 ms.



That's of course not taking into account the tens of routers in the way, the various slowdowns or the potential bottlenecks on the network.