[MUD-Dev] Early Attempts at Slaying the Lag Monster

[Amanda Walker]

On Nov 24, 2004, at 10:59 AM, Greg Boyd wrote:

> I saw that Amanda mentioned "smoothing" as one of the ancient ways
> to combat lag.  I have also read about this referred to as using a
> "dead reckoning" algorithm.  In short, you take position,
> velocity, and perhaps other physical elements and use
> interpolation/extrapolation to let the client see smoothly moving
> objects even if there is some congestion or dropped packets.
> Clearly this allows you to also send less packets to the user.

It works very well for objects that follow real world physics.  One
challenge with games is that players have been conditioned by FPSs
and console games to expect that their avatar has no momentum: 0-60
in one keypress, zero turning radius, starts and stops instantly.
This makes position prediction much harder than if there are limits
on acceleration.  Even a quarter to half second of ramp up/down time
on speed, and a reasonable limit on turning speed, would help a
lot--but unless they're in vehicles, players will probably complain
that motion isn't responsive enough.

> Question 2: Does anyone know of any references describing this
> technology before 1995?  This one has been tougher for me.

Well, some of the basic techniques (such as Kalman filters) go as
far back as 1960.  I believe that the first application to online
games was Quakeworld, but I don't recall when it was released.

--Amanda
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