Hacker News Reader

Comment by EugeneOZ | Hacker News Reader

With such latency we would have 0 online shooters. But we have a lot of them.

Basically everyone there uses client based prediction models (for your and enemies actions).

I know about it. Trust me, NOBODY will play with a teammate with 500ms latency. On EU servers my usual latency is 43-47ms. It's really far from "half of a second".

I (EU) played regularly with someone in Australia on R6:S and it wasn't much of a problem. He's used to latency issues so he played as well as anyone else would.

It's not possible to get used to such huge latency (500ms). He is a burden for a team in competitive games. It is a fact (if that "friend from Australia" exist at all).

That friend certainly exists and he's not a burden on the team. Maybe you focus too much on the latency number and forget that some people play to have fun, while still playing very decently.

I think it's very rude you suggest I don't know people in Australia (do you even know someone from Australia?)

Still I don't believe you. I have experience of playing competitive shooter with 250ms latency and it was nearly impossible to aim. And you are talking about 500ms latency. Let's just agree to disagree.

Well, he plays with between 100 and 300ms latency on average, atleast whenever I check the player screen. They're perfectly capable of hitting targets reliably.

On a similar note, I used to play World of Tanks with around 400ms latency before I got a better internet uplink, while it's certainly bad for a month, you start to get used to it eventually and the brain compensates. Of course, if reaction time matters you loose, but you can adapt your playstyle in a lot of games so that pure reaction time doesn't matter as much.

There is a bunch of tricks that go into the netcode though. A slight delay on hit recognition is noticeable and sometimes annoying, but movement can be silky smooth. With Stadia, wouldn't that latency open you up to input lag?

Of course there is, but there are some tricks also for it :) Modern software (and AI) can predict some user actions very precisely. Anyway, there will be input lag, without any doubts, even with the smartest AI, but for some games it's pretty acceptable. Especially for non-competitive ones.

I've used Parsec. It's not perfect, but better than a low to mid-range gaming machine. The input delay isn't as much of a problem as bandwidth, but it could definitely be improved. The problems arise when setting it to 120+ FPS.

60FPS works surprisingly well, and for single player games you probably wouldn't even notice the input delay.

Stadia is most likely much more optimized.

but thats different. the input is still local so the latency there is only the output. its much more noticable if the input has latency

Reply on news.ycombinator.com