Why is high tick rate so beneficial?
Imbalanxd
Join Date: 2011-06-15 Member: 104581Members
Join Date: 2011-06-15 Member: 104581Members
<div class="IPBDescription">serious underlying engine issues</div>Typically people with beast machines just have the frame advantage. Sure, high and consistent frame rates makes aiming and moving much easier, but as gamers we have become accustomed to that. Its annoying, but what can you do right?
However, in this engine, there seems to be so much more associated with high performance, and mainly high tick rate, as if it wasn't bad enough that high ping also killed frame rate and tick rate.
One thing that tick rate most certainly does, without question, is increases the hit detection inconsistencies. It will always be the same people who take shotgun blast after shotgun blast directly to the face, while sustaining absolutely no damage. I'm inclined to think that this is due to the interpolation that takes occurs on player position's. If player 1 does a zig zag movement with perfect tick rate, he moves erratically across the room. If player two tries the same, with massively reduced tick rate, his position is interpolated close to a straight line across the room.
I have a hunch that certain players also cause excessively more choke and frame lag when a low tick rate player needs to compensate their movements (ie, when they attack them), but I have no basis for this.
Quite honestly, I have never seen a game so ravaged by inconsistencies, and so biased towards better rigs. If the balance doesn't turn you away, then this unfair treatment surely will.
However, in this engine, there seems to be so much more associated with high performance, and mainly high tick rate, as if it wasn't bad enough that high ping also killed frame rate and tick rate.
One thing that tick rate most certainly does, without question, is increases the hit detection inconsistencies. It will always be the same people who take shotgun blast after shotgun blast directly to the face, while sustaining absolutely no damage. I'm inclined to think that this is due to the interpolation that takes occurs on player position's. If player 1 does a zig zag movement with perfect tick rate, he moves erratically across the room. If player two tries the same, with massively reduced tick rate, his position is interpolated close to a straight line across the room.
I have a hunch that certain players also cause excessively more choke and frame lag when a low tick rate player needs to compensate their movements (ie, when they attack them), but I have no basis for this.
Quite honestly, I have never seen a game so ravaged by inconsistencies, and so biased towards better rigs. If the balance doesn't turn you away, then this unfair treatment surely will.
Comments
Well, I'm talking about "client tick rate", which (in the source engine at least) translates to a bunch of separate settings, unlike the unified server tick rate setting of a single number.
Either way, if the server is processing inputs and updating the game world 60 times a second (random number), and I'm only supplying it with input 20 times a second, and receiving input from it 20 times a second, I'm getting severely fudged over. Especially if there is someone inputting and refreshing the full 60 times a second nearby. That's fine though, that's just a part of having lower performance, but it doesn't seem to be restricted to fewer position updates or more responsive server side position updated. It seems to be leaking into other aspects of the game, giving high tick rate players far more advantage than they should have.
<!--quoteo(post=1967416:date=Aug 28 2012, 03:53 PM:name=Rebel)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Rebel @ Aug 28 2012, 03:53 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1967416"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I think there's still a perception the judderyness from low tickrate servers and the graphics engine, right now the big choke on game "perfomance" isn't client frame rates at all it's the servers grinding to the a crawl but they are working on it.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This is true for certain people, but these people typically have little to worry about in terms of performance. However, if I go into combat and my game loop begins running at less than 15 times a second, my tick rate to the server can't be any higher. That's when the 80%+ choke comes in, as the server tries to give me updates I can't process, and that's when my position suddenly just remains static, as the server continues to update the game world, but received no updates from my machine.
The more things are in the world, the more time the server needs to update them all, decreasing the amounts of updates per second he can possibly do.
Example: If your exo-minigun is shooting 30 bullets per second and the server tick rate goes to 20, than 33% of your damage output are simply lost, because the server had no time to calculate them.
If you meant ping, than be assured, marines with high ping are a nightmare to hit. The lag compensation doesn't work that good. They are teleporting like s...
<b>€dit: Oh, you ment that? As far as I know, the game update loop on the client always calls the game logic first and than the graphics. Therefor client tickrate = fps. And no, a player with low fps has no advantage over one with many.</b>
This has always been highly contested in online games, and in my experience it just isn't true. I'll forget about the fact that I die just as fast as anyone else, teleporting or not. I've never been called out on teleporting, noone has ever called me dodgy, and noone has ever complained about my lag, because they never knew I was lagging.
I have, however, seen people with less than 150 ping (I typically play with 300-400) who teleported a massive amount, moving 3-4 skulk lengths at a time. Many other people also experienced the same from the same player. I'm pretty sure teleporting is either to do with line issues, or simple exploitation of the engine (as in HL1 rate exploiters).
Though the lag compensation is something that has been annoying me quite a lot lately. I won't go into the hit detection compensation for bullets, as that may just be the bad overall hit detection. However lately, with the lerk especially, the positional compensation has been utterly horrendous. It gets to the point where, if I am a lerk chasing a jetpacker, and he is flying away from me, it is not physically possible for me to bite him. This is because as I fly in for the bite, I will strike his (client side) hitbox, be slowed down, try to bite him, but obviously on the server he has moved quite a way away from that location, and miss. Furthermore, on the server my lerk is a good few meters behind his position on my client. Eve for stationery marines, I need to fly directly into them and wait 0.5 -1 seconds before biting so that my server position can catch up.
But these are all just difficulties of playing a game highly dependant on position, over a laggy connection. Good positional compensation has always eluded modern computer games.