Playstation LifeStyle interview with Luke... (Destiny)

by slycrel , Thursday, July 02, 2015, 17:33 (3232 days ago) @ Kahzgul

That all being said, the real problem with Destiny multiplayer is the awful netcode. I don't really get how you can go about balancing weapons when you still have invincible players running around soaking up golden gun shots and people getting postmortem melee kills. Gotta fix that first, imo.

Going to disagree with you here. I'm pretty sure the reason you can get a post-mortem kill is that they have timestamped actions. And there's a window where you can get "simultaneous" results. It's funner to trade shotgun or melee kills than it is to literally get beaten by 0.01 seconds to the punch. I think this is a skill/cheat equalizer, and very intentional. And it's also based on "game time" not "current real time". This is to prevent laggy players, or even players with bad connections between each other, basically teleporting all over the place.

So here's the thing. Lag makes this seem worse than it is. If a laggy player and a non-laggy player melee each other at the same time, but the laggy player doesn't die for a second or three, it's because of the game sync timestamping things. It's how they've chosen to manage lag. If you get a 1 second hiccup in your network traffic, the game still plays relatively smoothly -- you almost can't tell. They're working hard behind the scenes to make sure every avatar in your game is in the right place at the right time, relative to everyone else via the game timestamp.

This has some nasty side effects though. For someone who is really laggy, they are seeing in real time what may have actually happened seconds ago for everyone else. but since they are lagging, it looks like real time to them. So, they punch someone within a split second of seeing them. For the laggy guy, they also see the person punch them at the same time even though it happened 3-4 seconds ago. The original player who "hit first" finally gets a response, once the laggy player catches up and both players die.

This gets complicated fast when there's someone with super-lag. If someone should have died 5 seconds ago, but killed 2 people in the meantime, do those 2 people still die? How far do you go to make sure things stay in sync?

From a developer perspective, I think bungie has had to make some hard choices, and overall have done a great job with their net code. It's exploitable somewhat, but for the average player it's a much better experience because of it.