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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

Most likely not. To make cross platform multiplayer possible, they practically have to enforce the same physics timesteps on all platforms.

What most people perceive as a different feel is the input to display latency. On a TV with a controller that can easily be 4x higher than with a mouse on a PC screen.

In the early days, Microsoft did a famous study of how strongly input latency affects the way how people use office software. If I recall correction, 50ms in additional latency would lead to significantly less exploratory behavior.

And I think we all know that intuitively from the web. When a bloated newspaper site needs 5 seconds to load, you start to consciously consider if you really want to click that link, as opposed to just checking out everything slightly related on Wikipedia.

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GTA San Andreas (2004) did not have cross-platform multiplayer, so OP's assessment may be accurate.

2004 is a long time ago. I don't remember threading discussed any place when I started learning game development on a hobby and university level at that time. Probably because multiple cores wasn't a thing, so threading mostly would add complexity and cost performance. Core 2 was released in 2006 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_2

IIRC all places I did learn from did tell to throw everything into the game loop and remember to use delta since last frame in all calculations

You are correct. I didn't consider that it was such an old game.

In current times with digital drivers, enormous TVs, triple-buffering, and wireless controllers, I very much agree.

Would you know what contributed to the ItD latency discrepancy back in 2004? I would imagine a CRT TV vs a monitor to have much more similar latency, as well as a wired gamepad versus a wired KB+M. But I'm far from a specialist in this kind of thing.

> Microsoft did a famous study of how strongly input latency affects the way how people use office software

Would be quite interesting to look at that, if anyone has a link.

Sure, duckduckgo.com for example has ;-) But in that paper [0] they talk about 500ms, not 50. The rest of the keywords sound so similar and it is the only match, so I think I got the right one.

[0] https://idl.cs.washington.edu/files/2014-Latency-InfoVis.pdf

Indeed, sounds similar, though 2014 isn't quite ‘early years’ in my book, and MS doesn't seem to be involved here.

On my feeble attempts at searching, the results were instead filled with laments about high values of latency on touchscreens and modern PCs.

did you just tell him to let me duckduckgo that for you?

That's not the study that I was referring to, but I cannot find the original one, either. If my memory serves me correctly, they compared PS2 with USB and they showed white squares on a CRT screen, so I believe it was from way before 2014.

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