Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Why do we get continental lag? Will it ever be solved?
Jemcrystal
Member UncommonPosts: 1,984
I understand many factors contribute to lag but I am only wanting to talk about the mysterious continental lag. If I call someone on the phone while they are in France and I am in the United States I do not expect to get lag. What causes international mmorpg lag? Will there ever come a day when I in the USA can play with people in Britain, Australia, Philippines, and Japan without it making my character stagger like an insane drunk?
What's the hold up with this tech?
What's the hold up with this tech?
Comments
TL;DR
No, probably not in your life time.
You can see the delay when watching a lot of the news and they do remote video with another anchor out in the field. That weird delay from when the people in office are talking to when the remote anchor starts to talk.
Some day the solution will be solved but its going to require a lot of work from a lot of different people.
So much that goes into data travel over the internet. The greater the distance generally you have more machines your data goes through before it reaches its final destination. You also have situations when a hop might have more load or even be overloaded with data. So many what ifs and such to solve.
Light travels at exactly 299792458 m/s in a vacuum. That number can be known exactly because it's the definition of a meter. But it does mean that for light to go around the world would take about 140 ms.
Light travels slower than that in a fiber optic cable, however. It's bouncing around a lot within the cable rather than going straight, resulting in a net speed of about 2/3 of that. So you're looking at over 200 ms for light to go around the world in a fiber optic cable.
And that's assuming that you've got a dedicated cable for the entire route that follows a geodesic along the earth's surface. Real networks have various nodes along the way, which adds a bit of latency each time, as well as giving you a zig-zaggy path to some degree rather than going straight.
Add that all up and for communications with an antipodal point, a round-trip ping time of 300 ms would be pretty good. Now, you're not actually going to the opposite side of the earth, but to go between two random points on earth would on average be 1/4 of the way around each way, in which a ping time of 150 ms would be quite good.
So why doesn't that seem horribly laggy for phone calls? Because if you hear the other person talking 300 ms later than he hears himself talking relative to you, that doesn't feel that laggy. For some games, a 300 ms ping time is terrible, however.
If you're seeing 500 ms ping times and hoping to get that down to 200 ms, that could happen so long as you're not going to nearly the opposite side of the world, such as from Australia to the US. If you're hoping for 50 ms ping times to anywhere in the world, it would take a massive revolution in physics to make faster than light data transfer possible.
Software on the other hand is pretty fragile. It can't adapt to corruption very well, and at the same time requires incredible precision. Not a good combination.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/skyrim-anime-overhaul
What if one day we get a quantum entanglement network?
j/k
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
"The Philotic Parallax Instantaneous Communicator, more commonly known as the Ansible, was a device used for instantaneous communication across any distance.[1]"q
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
The fact QM has never produced anything that anyone can use on a technological level is a bit of a sticking point. But keep spending those billions on colliders and they are bound to one day.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Some continental lag will exists until we get quantum entanglement communications, tachyon communications, or some other scifi-like invention.
https://playdauntless.com/news/march-stability-and-server-update
GPU lag can be every bit or more important than internet lag.GPU lag requires the developer puts in the work/effort and most instead of doing that will simply create low end graphics then tell everyone they were aiming for a certain ART style,to which i call BS.
Now for an intense fps type game,no you need a very close ping difference if identical skilled players.Now i can beat for example 30 ping players in UT99 ,having myself a 200 ping but i would have to be a much better player,otherwise no chance.
Will it ever happen?Well again using UT99,someone created code that simulated each person playing as if offline,they called it a "zero ping"addon.Personally i find it to be flawed,yes a decent answer but it all depends on the game.Using ut99 as an example,a zero ping ruins the online design where you would expect lag and not expect weapons to be extremely over powered.Point being is that if the developer designs the dps to fall in line with zero pings and that software actually works perfectly then yes we might one day see that perfect world,very soon even.,
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Also latency is normally not affected by how much bandwidth you're using. If you're using close to your maximum bandwidth or if it's exceptionally busy server or busy time, it can occasionally be affected. But most of the time online games use so little bandwidth that there's no shortage and you could send 10 times the data you're sending and get exactly the same latency.
Also there are no 56K modems in commercial networks.