Lag?

[tagg1080]

Ok, with things like WASD movement and the such, there is a lag time, obviously.

What is an acceptable level?


My current map is sitting at about a little less than half a second lag time, and that is with 2 players, fairly far apart in location.

When you first start moving, it seems pretty bad, but you learn to not notice it.



So what do you guys think, what is an acceptable level of lag?

 

[Dr Super Good]

0.02 seconds for responsive keyboard run games like FPS or top down shooters.
0.1 seconds for a high speed map like SWAT aftermath.
0.25 - 0.75 for an RTS.

 

[PurplePoot]

Yes, because a Zombie shooter map requires more speed than a micro-heavy RTS?

Eh.

Also, I doubt .02 is even remotely close to accurate, and .25-.75 is definitely too much (even .25 is).

 

[Dr Super Good]

At times yes as situations can call for very fast movement respones to avoid damage.
Also 0.25 - 0.75 is for a casual RTS like supreme commander (average ping range infact). For SC2 melee 0.1 - 0.25 is probably a decent latency (obviously lower for more intense play) and falls pretty much into the time units take for weapon damage point and even casting delay on instant cast spells.

0.02 is 50 updates a second, which is pretty accurate. You could probably get away with as low as 10 updates a second (0.1) but anything lower starts to make lag more annoying and noticable. For example I do not want to jump half a second after hitting a buton to jump over something that just appeared onscreen but hits me due to lag.

The side scrolling beat them up metal slug map suffers horribly from this problem. Where as the AI enemies have no problem alighning to you and moving, you can not really evade nor can you acuratly get yourself to aim at the enemies (you often end up being on the wrong X / Y to shoot them due to overshooting or undershooting the stop point.

Usually games like alien swarm use client server syncronization where a single server keeps updating the positions of all the clients data and the clients run with near no latency (allows for lag equal to the time from client to server).

In SC2, however (as the above method is not useful for large scale RTS like SC2, which uses a peer syncronization system each person runs an instance of the game where effects inside the game are the same at any given frame. This means that all computers have to receive the orders before they can be run so you have the latency of client to server and then server to all the clients (which needs a certain tollerence latency to prevent stuttering and keep game flowing) so instantly latency probably double if not worse.

I heard keyboard events need even more syncronization and thus have slightly higher latency still than normal ingame actions.
It is important for people designing maps to remember that there is such latency on keyboard and mouse responses. Thus they should not make the map require timing which are not much larger than the latency.

An example where it would work fine is a turn based RPG to navigate menues with the right interface. It will not work well however to make a fast paced FPS where you can take 5-7 hits before you can even respond or that it is impossible to hit anything that walks irratically.

 

[mrzwach]

0.25 is probably what you want to aim for.

Under a half second is acceptable, provided the game isn't incredibly fast paced.

Its probably too laggy to do anything using WASD other than a top-down.

 

[Arhowk]

blizzard specifically says to not use this trigger a lot of times because it makes lots of network traffic lol