Originally Posted by
Nidhogg
Bear in mind that far more information is "round-tripped" to the server now than used to be back in the old days. You can thank your friendly local exploiters and hackers for that one. A lot of processing that used to take place solely client-side now has to be paralleled on the server to stop people cheating. Because the work is done in both places you sometimes see an immediate result but then a check message is transferred to see whether your client came up with the same result as the server. The server's version of events can then sometimes overwrite your client's version if they differ causing "bounces" and other strange anomalies.
Also, remember that this is an FPS style of game where you can run, walk, stop, duck, jump, zigzig left and right at any time, draw a weapon, change weapons etc. etc. especially during a fight. Imagine how much more traffic is required versus those games where you just point at a place on the map and click.
It's all very interesting stuff (especially when you bring in more advanced topics like movement prediction based on velocity vectors and so on), but it's very difficult to balance update frequencies of various events through a narrow pipe. Perhaps the relative importance and frequency of messages can be adjusted to improve the "clipping" effect - I don't have access to the code so I can't say - but we'll continue to look into it.
N
/edit - a classic example of parallel working is when you buy something from a shop. Your client calculates the prices that you see on the screen but it's the server that negotiates the price you actually pay. There was a bug waaay back in the day when the algorithm in the client was slightly different to the one on the server and the price you paid turned out to be different to the one you saw in the trade window. Once upon a time this was all client-side code, but exploiters quickly found a way of intercepting the messages so they could get whatever they wanted for free. A lot of time and effort goes into detecting and fixing these problems which you don't see in the patch notes. This can result in what appear to be small patches taking a long time to produce...
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Nick "Nidhogg" Milner
English Lead Moderator, Community Consultant
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