Gotcha (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, December 16, 2015, 19:44 (3360 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

the model you are describing is exactly what Bungie used for Halo's co-op campaign and Firefight matchmaking, which was a lag-filled nightmare due for a variety of reasons (mostly not the fault of the networking itself, more due to overall lack of players with quality connections). The real catch with that kind of "synchronous" network model is that a single player with a laggy connection (or someone suffering from packet loss) will slow down the game for everyone, since the host can't update the game state until they receive refresh info from all other players in the game.

Close, but no. The CoD model of PvP networking means only the host has a perfect connection, but their connection is perfect 100% of the time because the entire match is served on the host's machine. Anyone else connecting to that machine is just telling that machine how to move their player, when they shoot, etc... and all of those things happen when the host system says they do (broadcasting that data back to the other players). There's never a pause for syncing or anything like that. The host system doesn't give a shit about synchronicity at all. BUT, because the servers keep track of who has reliable connections with minimal lag and favor those players as the hosts, synchronicity a'la the halo games is not really an issue. The more people play, the more data the servers have to determine whose connection is most reliable (and thus, most in sync across all players).

It sucks if there are no reliable servers near you because you'll always be handicapped (unless you're the host), but for most players it works out really well, with pings in the 20s of milliseconds.

It's all coming back to me now. I believe Bungie went with the strictly synchronous model for co-op/firefight in order to avoid crashes that would be caused by divergent AI behavior that would occur if players were allowed to fall out of sync with the host (and each other).

Of course, Destiny PvP doesn't typically need to worry about AI... until SRL showed up. Hmmmm...

Hilariously, lag-switching in SRL provides no real advantage, unlike in normal PvP.