I''m looking for info on latency hiding algorithms, and prediction for fast-action internet games. In local area networks the prediction is quite simple, because latency is usually not as big as in WAN. But how did they make Quake game run so smoothly via internet?

There''s an article on Gamasutra about "dead reckoning". It''s a good introduction to latency hiding.

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How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

Yes I''ve already read it, but this is not enough for the WAN environment, because the predicted state can differ a lot from the actual game state (i mean the client-server scheme with all the calculations performed on the server side)

They can indeed. And that error, more or less, is inevitable. Since there''s no way to get data across the line faster than the available latency, you have to rely on predictions; and predictions are often wrong. More advanced latency-hiding algorithms improve the appearance of correcting errors, but they can''t get around this simple fact.

Ok, thanx for fast replys, sneftel %). And what about other prediction algorythms? I mean i''m looking for a more in-depth research on the topic, not only the dead-reckoning algorithms.

Here''s a more academic and in-depth approach that you may find useful. Remember to look at cited works.

Conner, Brook and Loring Holden, "Providing a LowLatency User Experience in a High-Latency Application". To appear in Proceedings of 1997 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics (Providence, Rhode Island, April 27-30, 1997). http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/conner97providing.html

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How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

hmm... no I don''t need a scientific research on latency hiding. Are there any other tutorials or docs on latency hiding for game environments, such as the ''Dead Reckoning'' article?

You may want to take another look at that article. I can''t count on my fingers the number of times I''ve gotten good ideas for my game from a scholarly journal rather than a l33t online tutorial. Games and Virtual Reality have quite a lot in common.

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How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

quote:

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Original post by Sneftel
I can''t count on my fingers the number of times I''ve gotten good ideas for my game from a scholarly journal ...

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So it''s more than 10?

Sorry, just never heard those two expressions combined.

Well, it is quite hard for me to understand it, so i''m looking for a simpler description of the problem and some tutorials on solving it.