Online Gun Trigger Timing

[SAS_Storebror]

Hi folks,

 

I've noticed that when playing online, there's a significant delay between when another player squeezes his gun triggers, and you actually see bullets coming off his guns.

There is however no such delay in the impact of bullets, resulting in a rather strange visual representation of what's happening, i.e. you see the bullets hit, damage or even destroy their target way before you see the plane start firing, and way after it stopped firing, you still see bullets coming off that plane, shooting holes in the air.

 

Note that his is not a ping issue and it's not a CPU load issue on Server or Client either.

We've tried this with two players, each of us with a ping less than 30ms to the Server, and the Server load was "baseline" in dserver.exe and less than 5% on Task Manager.

 

This happens all the time, therefore it's easily reproducable.

It happens with both Player and AI planes, but with player planes it's more significant than with AI planes.

 

Cheers!

Mike

Edited March 9, 2018 by SAS_Storebror
Added reproducability and AI statement

[Ehret]

I think it's due the networking model - ballistic are computed on clients, right? If so only the shooting client will see the "true" event and without any network delay - the rest will get info about hits and only then their clients will start to render "fake afterimages".

Edited March 9, 2018 by Ehret

[SAS_Storebror]

I'm afraid it's slightly different.

It seems like the bullet hits are replicated with priority, but the trigger key presses simply get delayed for whatever reason.

If the Client would render "fake shots" to get the same hit effect, then this would mean that the delayed shots would at least still hit their target.

But they don't.

If for instance a player attacks another plane with lots of speed advantage, closes in to 200m, opens fire and pulls up behind, then what other players see is that the slower plane gets hit, and after pulling up, the player will start to shoot somewhere into the blue skies.

 

Some will say "what gives?" and they have a point, but this issue is pretty apparent on action screenshots, any kind of videos from online gameplay, and most notably it completely negates the fact that in reality, with a good sense of situational awareness, a pilot can plan his break from enemy fire by observing his six during an enemy's attack, which in IL-2 due to this limitation is simply impossible.

 

Cheers!

Mike

[Ehret]

Just now, SAS_Storebror said:

I'm afraid it's slightly different.

It seems like the bullet hits are replicated with priority, but the trigger key presses simply get delayed for whatever reason.

If the Client would render "fake shots" to get the same hit effect, then this would mean that the delayed shots would at least still hit their target.

 

Not necessarily, if hits and planes positions get a top priority. Only sequence of consequences can be guaranteed;  not exact timing of them.

The alternative would be to have everything done on server side, but then some shoots would just "spark".

The accuracy of consequences or the accuracy of visual representation - chose one.

 

 

 

Edited March 9, 2018 by Ehret

[SAS_Storebror]

While I see the need to prioritize certain parts of the net protocol, in comparison to e.g. IL-2 1946, IL-2 Great Battles falls behind in this regard.

Of course, when ping times go into the 300s or even higher, then a certain mismatch between what a local player does and what a remote one sees are to be expected, but here we are talking about a delay in a range of more than a second when the whole roundtrip player1->server->player2->server->player1 takes less than 100ms.

 

This is by no means inevitable as much older games and their net code demonstrate pretty well.

 

Cheers!

Mike

[Ehret]

Yup - considering how often I'm getting disconnects and how hard it can be to join MP games sometimes, the network code could use some tuning...