operator-1 wrote:
The game lies to us - it shows us one thing on our screens, but then it seems to turn the clock back & do something else completely different.
We can't trust what the game decides to display on our screens because too often it contradicts what it's showing us.
It's to the point where I don't even enjoy my victories anymore because I'm not sure if I won by skill or if my opponents simply got screwed over by MW3's broken lag/sync problems.
Well it's called client-side prediction, or predictive rendering*, and it's designed to do this on purpose so that players of varying connection quality can still enjoy a smooth game. (This is part of what they added new in Black Ops.) That's why when you have a 2-bar in BO or MW3 the game still plays quite smoothly, but in MW2 it can feel nonresponsive like running through syrup.
What you have to understand is that the game MUST lie to you, purely for technical reasons, or it would become unplayable if the latency delta between players gets > 100ms or so. I can tell you as a network engineer and programmer that without these types of systems there could not be unstructured online multiplayer, pure and simple. You would need dedicated servers and each client would need to have latency within a ~25ms window to the server and to each other if you wanted a fair playfield without these systems.
Lag compensation and client prediction go hand in hand because while your client is waiting for the data packet with info on what everyone else is doing, the models need to keep moving on your screen unless you want people skipping frames across the screen.
*The faster paced the game is, the less predictable player movements are, and that's when the system starts to go pear shaped and you see people facing different directions in your live view vs killcam, etc.
I've also mentioned before that in user interface design you need timely positive acknowledgement of user action and that is why people get mad, because as you've said, what you see with your own two eyes is contradticted some seconds later by an unknown outside arbitrary process and this ticks people the wrong way. Properly implemented though these systems are designed to be unobtrusive and relatively unnoticed.
Now granted, the implementation of this in MW3 obviously has problems that the team is working on, but I can assure you that there is no way the system could be "reverted" to MW2 without major difficulty and we need to just take G IH A IN ID II at his word that this is their top priority. Maybe altogether different lag compensation and prediction systems can be implemented in a future game, but for now, they have to fix what they've got.
