Metal Slug on the PS4 was jarringly unresponsive compared to my expectations, though I'm not sure I've played it on an arcade machine in 20 years so maybe it's my memory or physiology at least partly to blame.
It doubly screws you in the chocobo racing section because the controls assume no delay, meaning you can’t respond to hazards in time and constantly overcorrect movement.
The obvious fix for laggy input is to apply the same processing to local input, but I've not heard of anyone doing this.
(I think this technique is known as netcode.)
Touch events were run through a filter to predict where the touch position would be some number of frames in the future -- presumably to compensate for page-flipping delays. Not sure it made much difference, mostly because smooth animations on old versions of Android were extremely difficult because of inadequate CPUs/GPUs.
The classes used to do predictive tracking don't seem to be used anymore in current best practice/current API sets.
I wish modern game developers & graphics pipelines would spend more effort optimizing input latency. I'll stop noticing the graphics 2 minutes into playing the game. But if the input is laggy, I'll feel that the entire time I'm playing. And the feeling of everything being a bit laggy will linger long after I stop playing.
You've already bought the game at this point so most devs don't care.
An insane amount of money and effort that goes into most AAA games. It seems like a stretch to accuse the industry of not caring about the quality of the games they make.
What I meant is that most people are way more sensitive to graphics than anything else. A lot of people will never play a game that is ugly but don't seem to mind laggy inputs.
There are a lot of games that, even without "real" input lag, have tons of animation dampening/inertia to the point that it makes them IMHO unresponsive, just to improve the "cinematic feel" and avoid characters instantly changing direction.
If you prefer responsiveness to having the player character spin be perfectly smooth, well, sucks to be you, because prettier games sell better.
Obviously this doesn't apply to fighting games or competitive shooters or anything like that where responsiveness is the point of the game.
Maybe. I wouldn’t be surprised most people are much more sensitive to input latency than we think. But when there’s input latency, they have no idea that that’s the problem so instead they attribute the slushy feel of the game on something else. Or just don’t enjoy the game as much without knowing why. Game developers talk a lot about “game feel” and this is the kind of thing they’re talking about.