EndLagNow.org Forums / EndLagNow.org Forums / I Hate Lag! / the worst kind of lag... / Latest Posts

RE: the worst kind of lag...

Ben1220 — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 03:44:20 GMT

Game Boy (3/22/2006)

the worst kind of lag imo is when it lasts more than a few seconds. the little glitchy lags are really annoying, but they doesn't piss me off as bad as when the lag causes a game to slow down or freeze for multiple seconds or minutes (if the server doesnt disconnect by then). i've seen it happen when there's a lot of players on the server, a lot of players in one place, when something is going on in the background on my comp, but worst of all when it happens for no apparent reason. this kind of lag just pisses me off and makes me wanna stop playing.

how frustrating is it when you know you should be moving and know you probably are but just don't see it on the screen and start to wonder where you'll end up a moment later whenever the lag goes away, in fact sometimes i get pissed off and just smack the keyboard to see where in the hell i end up.

I know exactly how you feel... I can live with the glitchy lag that makes you move in bursts, or even the stupid rubber band lag, that really annoys me when I am sniping my computer keeps trying to move me back to an area where I am exposed to the enemy, but when it pauses for seconds and nothing happens... enough is enough

RE: the worst kind of lag...

binlaggin4evr — Sun, 06 May 2007 16:06:57 GMT

Hello everyone, i am new to these forums but i am a long time lag sufferer I am convinced that I definitely have one of the worst types of lag. The lag that I have started one day about 4 years ago and has been getting worse regardless of all the measures i've taken to combat it. I play only FPS type games like Quake 4 online and the lag is so crippling that I cannot play close to my capabilities at all. It doesn't matter what game, server (local or not), time of day, ISP or internet speed i have the lag is always very BAD. My ping is also not indicative of how badly I am lagging, as it can show 50 or 150 and it feels the same. I know i am getting constant lag spikes all the time because my ping usually (but not always) spikes 50ms or more. All of this lag makes it nearly impossible to maintain my rhythm in games and throws my timing off. I am a very good and experienced FPS player but playing with such horrid lag makes me look bad. Aside from being very infuriating, more upsetting is the fact that my enjoyment of playing online is gone.

RE: the worst kind of lag...

Q3A June — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 05:21:11 GMT

Soldier X (8/19/2006)

thats not the worst kind of lag.

When i play call of duty sometimes,i will get what i call a 'Recall'

i will retrace the steps i just made in the last 30 seconds. and any other move i make,will go super fast,then re-wind!!!

That,Makes me mad.

Yeah I have read much on what you call "recall" I thought this would do a good job of explaining it as it is the same or very similar to the way ALL games handle process and render gameworld events

Prediction error

When you move, it takes about half your ping for the server to get an update that you did. Basically, you see yourself ahead of where you really are on the server. This is the “prediction” part: your own game predicting where you'll be. It's why sometimes you get hit with rockets that you think you dodged and you dodge rockets that look like they should hit you. It of course gets worse the higher your ping is.
Now, your game can't always know where you'll be. It can't know for certain whether or not you'll be hit by a rocket, for instance. If you get hit by one, your game will learn that from the server, and will have to handle “prediction error.” It does this by easing you into your correct position over the course of 1/10 second. That's one reason rocket jumping with a high ping looks so weird.
It takes a bit of time (about half your ping) for your game to find out that you got hit, though. During this time, your predicted position is completely off. What happens if you fire a railgun during that time?

Right: where you think you fired from isn't where the server thinks you fired from, and you might miss. Or you might think you missed, but hit anyway. Unfortunately, there's nothing much we can do about this one. We just have to deal with it, and assume the server is always correct when it judges a hit test.

Another common event besides getting hit by a rocket that will cause prediction error is brushing up against another player. That's why sometimes hit tests in close-up battles look so off. They're not, really – it's just that your game thought you would be in a different place than you actually ended up.

Missed snapshots, late snapshots, and missed commands
A “snapshot” is a chunk of data that you get from the server, sent at the end of every server frame. If the server's sv_fps is set to 20, you get 20 of these in a second. This is how your game knows what's going on around you. A snapshot contains information about other players, projectiles, items, you name it – anything not part of the map itself.

If you miss a snapshot, where you see other players will not be correct. Exactly what kind of “not correct” isn't necessarily important. It's that the server, not able to know which snapshots you got and which you didn't, will assume you got them all, and do all of your hit tests accordingly. What the server thinks you saw and what you really saw will not be the same thing.

If you have red lines in the lower section of your lag-o-meter, you've got this problem.

Receiving snapshots late can cause problems as well. Your client has to keep drawing stuff while it hasn't received an update from the server, and it figures out where to put things by guessing (extrapolating, actually). Sometimes the guesses aren't quite right, and again, what the server thinks you saw and what you really saw will not be the same thing.

If you have yellow bits at the top of your lag-o-meter and you aren't using a negative cl_timenudge, there's a good chance you've got this problem.

Outgoing packet loss can also cause problems. If a command from you that tells the server to fire your gun doesn't get to the server, it'll get taken care of in the next command. If that one doesn't get there, it'll be taken care of in the one after that, and so on. If this kind of thing happens, the server will get a different idea about the time you pressed the fire button than when you actually did.
If your lag-o-meter's green line looks really jagged, you may have this problem.

Fortunately, all of these problems are hardly ever bad enough that they'll totally screw your hit tests over. If they're bad enough to do that, they usually cause other problems that keep you from having a decent game anyway. For the most part, they'll just make things look weird every once in a while.

Combinations

You're going to get combinations of all these effects. Sometimes the combination will end up subtractive (they'll sort of cancel each other out), and sometimes they'll end up additive.
In any case, I must repeat this: everything I've described happens with or without Unlagged. They're just easier to see when full lag compensation is enabled.

Does Unlagged give high pingers the advantage?
Though many have theorized that this is the case (and even asserted it as fact and used it in speaking out against lag compensation), Unlagged does not give high pingers any extra advantage over low pingers.

It's obviously going to be more of a help to them. If one friend of mine has a buck and another has five, I'm definitely going to have to give more money to the friend with only one dollar if I want them each to have ten.

“Ah hah! But do they each really have ten now?” somebody says. Then he names some scenario, and I show him how it works out perfectly fair. (It's actually never perfectly fair, because even if it appears so, the low-pinger's commands to fire will always reach the server first. He will always win if the situation comes down to a race to fire.) Here are two common ones.

The high pinger can shoot around corners. Alright, tossing aside the notion that his target was in plain sight when he fired, sure, it looks like that. Reverse the situation, though: if the high pinger is the target and the low pinger is the attacker, the low pinger sees the “shooting around corners” effect to exactly the same degree as the low pinger did in the original situation.

(And to the people who say they don't pay their exorbitant broadband fees to play like an HPB, I say cry me a river, go jump in a lake, whatever. If they don't see any value in lack of prediction error, actually being able to use projectile weapons in close-up battles, seeing things more exactly as they happen, always winning a race to fire condition, and not having to deal with having half their commands or snapshots either dropped or suppressed, I don't want to talk. gg sportsmanship.)

Every assertion of this type becomes quite benign as soon as you reverse the situation. Also, don't forget that, even after you reverse it, the low pinger still wins the race to fire and thus has at least a slight advantage in every case.

The high pinger can make tons of shots that should miss. One low-pinger I know tried an interesting experiment: he started some large downloads and played an Unlagged mod. He reported hitting things he shouldn't have – what I call false hits.

Well of course he did.
He also caused most of his received snapshots to arrive inconsistently or never arrive at all. The top of his lag-o-meter had an awful lot of yellow, which means the things his game was rendering didn't match up with what the server thought it rendered. It probably ended up dropping his outgoing packets as well, or making them late enough that the server dropped them. These kinds of conditions are simply not good for consistency. (There's a more complete explanation of the effects of bad network conditions at the end of the previous question.)

Even if your friendly neighborhood high pinger has connection problems that bad, they're not going to help his rail percentage. They'll more likely hurt it. Which would you rather have: good network conditions, where players you aim at are guaranteed to be where you saw them for hit tests; or bad network conditions, where the players you aim at have a good chance of actually being elsewhere?

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that the high pingers who have stuck it out with Quake 3 for instance, probably have better aim than most, on average. If you give some of them a lag-compensated hitscan weapon, they can be downright scary.

RE: the worst kind of lag...

Q3A June — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 04:47:11 GMT

Tytus (8/20/2006)

Soldier X, that sounds to me like what I call Warping or Rubber-banding!

Tytus

I have to agree with Tytus with one exception, as far as the server anomalies you are seeing. I noticed a member here named "Reformed OGC user" and he mentions his experience.

For those of you who aren't aware of OGC they were a team of some pretty impressive game hacker / Programmers. It was founded by the infamous "NOSKILL" who is arguably the most notorious aimbot hack creator the Internet gaming community has ever known. This guy was so clever so talented at finding game exploits, he literally had the developers at the famous EVENBALANCE anti cheat PUNK BUSTER, pulling their hair out trying to stop him.

He was a very industrious game hacker that had an almost cult like band of followers he taught how to master the art of cheating.

It took some time for Punk Buster to finally stop this guy from making cheats that would cir***vent PB's anti cheat methods. Some say he was bought off by Even-Balance executives using a cash incentive attached to a binding contract.

One of his legacy's is that he discovered a way to use lag as a cheat to feign death. That spawned more sophisticated types and versions of various lag cheats. I have even seen them used as an option in the settings menus of many aimbots ie; Autolag, SnapLag, LagNow just to name a few. Halo is a game that is so infected with lag cheaters that it has destroyed any chance of an honest game.

Of any kind of lag you can experience,, NONE will make you as frustrated, confused, suspicious and angry as a server of players using self induced "artificial" lag .

The biggest problem is that it is considered a "soft cheat" when in fact it is the most insidious and despicable cheat of any kind bar-none.

Now,, they are used in almost ALL FPS games.

I could go on about this particular type of lag and how it effects gamestate, playersstate etc, as it has been somewhat of an obsession researching it for the past 4 years.

I was hoping Dr. Harlan Beverly could incorporate into his lagmeter a tool to trace lag but more specifically,, abrupt net settings changes being made by players during play on any gameserver.

Nothing will cause a synchronized servers gamestate to decay like lag hacks will. As central to fighting lag as BIGFOOT is, I would think that now would be a good time for them to champion a victory over artificial lag. Quite frankly I think it is an epidemic being responsible for more complaints about game lag then any other lag causing phenomena.

It is resulting in more disenchanted consumers of games and an exodus of existing players that have just grown disgusted with all the "strange coincidences" going on in games servers that they snap not knowing unequivocally what or who is behind it.

So they quit never to play online games again.

- June

RE: the worst kind of lag...

Tytus — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 21:32:56 GMT

Soldier X, that sounds to me like what I call Warping or Rubber-banding!

We've got more definitions here: http://www.endlagnow.org/ELN/WhatIsLag.aspx

Nasty thing to sort out! Have you tried LagMeter to show you what might be the cause?

Tytus

RE: the worst kind of lag...

Soldier X — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 17:48:53 GMT

thats not the worst kind of lag.

When i play call of duty sometimes,i will get what i call a 'Recall'

i will retrace the steps i just made in the last 30 seconds. and any other move i make,will go super fast,then re-wind!!!

That,Makes me mad.

RE: the worst kind of lag...

MrWizard6600 — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 03:09:23 GMT

hbomb (3/28/2006)

Mr Wizard, I'm not familiar with either of those games...

Can you spell out the Acryonyms please. What the hell is 'A'...?

Incidentally, Ping jumps up a lot when the action is hot, sometimes because your CPU/GPU isn't up to snuff: Sometimes because the server has to send you more data... sometimes, the server just gets bogged down in heavy action scenes.

Either way, explain more what game your playing, and what your crazy acronyms mean!!!!

hbomb

(whats wrong with my script? anywho you know what i mean...)
LOL.

Ace just means Kill everyone on the Opposing team. it just means one dude can take down the enimies entire team. in that case it was me Aceing them.

Cyber Amature League (CAL) is an online league which allows for people, who cant make it to the Cyber Professional League (CPL, www.thecpl.com), to test there skills agains other (usually) pro players. there are 5 differant levels in Cal, the Best Being CAL- Invite, or CAL-I and the lowest Being CAL-Open or CAL-O, im in the middle, or CAL Main, or CAL-M. its confusing i know, but you get it eventually.

and im a Hardware nerd, im running a 6600GT oced to 600/1.15, on an atholon XP oced to 2.5Ghz, and i had console FPS running, it told me everything was fine, it was my ISP that was failing me. it was my PING that failed me. My choke was fine. My computer was fine. MY ISP, not so fine.

ps, my sig is one of the CPLs slogans, or was one of the lanfests slogans... one or the other, anywho in the CPL the pings never go above 10 milliseconds. (10/1000 of a sec, pretty sweet! all pings are measured in MS, or Millisecs)

RE: the worst kind of lag...

ReformedOGCuser — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 11:07:22 GMT

I can't speak for some of these posts but I know that before I left the OGC team, they were talking about programming an auto-lag feature into one of the hacks they used. We knew that small variations in console settings made on the fly such as snaps maxpackets or fps would cause enough lag to feign death.

I don't remember seeing it after the alpha versions were started because most people playing console games could make such lag cheats just by binding them to keys using a toggle.

It's gotten pretty pervasive and with enough players doing it you could lag a server so bad it's impossible to know if you were in a fair game or not. I had ended up quitting playing several of my favorite games because of it.

RE: the worst kind of lag...

exglade — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 22:43:26 GMT

HA! I meet the worst! I Hate it! I can't connect to the internet for few day!!! In Malaysia, Streamyx really suck! Only sometimes I can use. But now... It's been ok a little bit...

RE: the worst kind of lag...

TurkeySandwich — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 08:17:45 GMT

HATE HALO LAG...

In fact, I think I will register that site.

RE: the worst kind of lag...

DanDruff — Tue, 30 May 2006 15:11:21 GMT

If Halo don't make you mad enough to break stuff...NOTHING WILL!!!

Netcode=doodie

RE: the worst kind of lag...

Game Boy — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 19:11:10 GMT

Akula (3/22/2006)

I actually broke a keyboard before from getting pissed from the the lag.

lmao!! omg akula & ninepointer you guys make me laugh breaking stuff with your lag induced tempers... i thought i was bad!!!

RE: the worst kind of lag...

hbomb — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 09:02:48 GMT

RE: the worst kind of lag...

MrWizard6600 — Sun, 26 Mar 2006 22:06:55 GMT

im sure everyones got there horror stories. how bout an almost ACE in CAL. how bout that lag. how bout it?

long A, they walk A im setup they jump out i kill four and hey! guess what! ping jumped way the hell up there! the dude hit me with his ak b4 i even saw his head! seriosly not cool.

RE: the worst kind of lag...

ninepointer — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 17:19:40 GMT

I almost won because I had 24 kills in a slayer match and was way in the lead. After the screaming, somebody got to 25 kills before me. gotta learn to focus

RE: the worst kind of lag...

hbomb — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 11:47:02 GMT

Hey Niner, how were you going to Win Halo?

You mean deathmatch or CTF?

At any rate, when you say you lagged, does that mean your screen froze at the wrong moment?

Really man, you can't ***** about Lag if you don't know what kind of Lag you had.

Check out ELN's "What is Lag section"

RE: the worst kind of lag...

ninepointer — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 10:40:19 GMT

Last night I was playin Halo and I was finally about to win, when my friend lagged and screamed and cursed and flung his chair across the room. I looked up and got shot, and ended up losing.

****ing lag...

RE: the worst kind of lag...

Tytus — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 09:59:26 GMT

Wow! Are you getting that kind of '2-second' pausing on a Broadband!

That's pretty wild, and likely a result of some serious packet loss (Network Lag), or maybe some Severe server loading, either way, that definately does suck!

[Tyt]Tytus

RE: the worst kind of lag...

hbomb — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 09:29:00 GMT

Hopefully it's not one of those Z-Boards, I've been looking at!

Those long delays can really be bad for sure!

hbomb

RE: the worst kind of lag...

Akula — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 18:52:43 GMT

I actually broke a keyboard before from getting pissed from the the lag.

the worst kind of lag...

Game Boy — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 18:39:45 GMT