Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
LAG! What is it good for? Absolutely, nothing!
porgie
Member Posts: 1,516
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?
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?
-----------------------
</OBAMA>
Comments
"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.
$OE lies list
http://www.rlmmo.com/viewtopic.php?t=424&start=0
"
And I don't want to hear anything about "I don't believe in vampires" because *I* don't believe in vampires, but I believe in my own two eyes, and what *I* saw is ******* vampires! "
what do you see as laggy latency
> 50ms
> 100ms
> 300ms
>1000ms
Please bear with me as I ask this ..
--
bain
http://foad.za.net
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
I could probably enjoy PvP someday when lag is not an issue, but for now I'm sticking with good ol PvE.
===============================
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
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.
Infinity: The Quest for Earth, space-sim MMO with a seamless procedural galaxy.