Visual vs Positional Lag

Performance & Profiling
1

So we’ve hit a bit of a roadblock and we aren’t really sure what it means…

What we’ve been finding as we test the networking side of our game is that the positional information is updating almost instantly, while the graphical information updates considerably slower. The time of the visual lag seems to be linked to the amount of movement the player is doing as well as what seems to be either the framerate or computer hardware.

Example:

Computer A = Slow - FPS 20
Computer B = Fast - FPS 70

If I run around for approximately 18 sec on Computer B while watching myself on Computer A, my player won’t stop running (visually - on Computer A)until almost 15 seconds after it’s stopped running on Computer B. The weird part is if there are objects in the scene that react to the players position, they will react on both computers based on the players position on Compter B.

So, it seems as though the positional information and visual information isn’t being linked… any ideas of what we’re doing wrong?

2

I would guess your interpolation or extrapolation code is actually causing this by forcing your local representation of the other player to move through all points instead of ensuring that it tries to be “as current as possible” and drops outdated target points

3

Thanks for the reply :slight_smile: and sorry for the late response. I had forwarded a link to this thread in the hopes that our programmer would make a more educated response however it seems he’s a little busy.

We are using (for the most part) the networking scripts that came with the smartfox island network example. From what I can tell the same problem is happening there, so, if perhaps we weren’t using any sort of interpolation / extrapolation code would we also be experiencing the same problem? or would this imply that there was some piece of interpolation / extrapolation code in our scripts at the moment that we would simply need to adjust?

Again, sorry for the uneducated response and thanks for the information.