Unlagged: Good or Absolute Scum

[techhead]

Listen people.
Unlagged will almost never kill you. Exceptions would be when the server chokes on a packet and starts doing 2+3=53 while handleing the extra calculations.
Unlagged will, however, prevent lag from saving your life. If lag was not there in the first place, it ideally should make no difference.

People who used to be good at dodging before unlagged now feel like suck because it is new and you aren't used to it, and some situations are changed.

Example 1: Marksman can't lead
Stock (Pre-unlagged)
The attacker does not know how to lead properly, so he misses you completely and you hop around unscathed.
Unlagged
Again, the attacker does not lead, and he shoots at what he sees as you being there. The server re-winds it for him, and confirms that would have hit you had there been perfect 0 latency. It registers as a hit, and you walk away bleeding.

Example 2: Corner-warp
Stock
You make a last minute dodge to safety. The attacker's client did not register the dodge happen until after the fact, so he shoots at your 'shadow' and you make it out clean.
Unlagged
You make a last-minute dodge to safety. The attacker's client still does not see the dodge until after it happens. However, when he shoots a direct hit on you, the server re-winds it to see if he would have hit you had there been perfect 0 latency. It would have hit you, so it registers as a hit and you unfortunately die.

Everyone loves the first example, as its what unlagged is supposed to do. However, not many people like the second, as it is very unfair from thier point of view, but indeed very fair from the attackers, and from a global standpoint. I will admit that I am a much better player without unlagged, but I support the option being there none the less. If you don't like it, leave it off on your own servers, and if you really don't like it, you can choose different servers to play on.

[Nux]

Here is a little game from the perspective of two players, Mr.X and Dr.Y.

One day, Mr.X decides to play some tremulous on his computer. He looks at his server list and find that he has poor pings with all the servers. Mr.X was about to regret his decision on moving to Antarctica when.. he remembers! Unlagged can help him!

He promptly joins Server-Z which happens to be running Unlagged. Mr.X fetches a coffee while he waits for the server to connect.. The next day he wakes up to find it's connected. He celebrates with another coffee.

He joins aliens and finds he has entered into a calm, magical world where dretches walk through walls and bullets never seem to fire when he expects them to. At least it's fluent -he thinks while appearing on and off a ledge.

He sees a human and happily strolls up to him as he appears to be distracted by something over Mr.X's shoulder, and proceeds to chomp his head off.

Dr.Y was happily chomped by Mr.X

Mr.X is quite proud of himself and takes a calm stroll past the enemy base to find other friendly people..

Meanwhile, over at Dr.Y's computer, Dr.Y is twitching away at his mouse and keyboard murdering all that he sees. Dr.Y is frequently playing on Server-Z because it's the only server he has a very low ping with. He notices a goon step right into his firing line and fills him full of lead. Strangely the goon doesn't die, but instead manages to chomp Dr.Y's head off from the other side of the room and walk off. Dr.Y get's very frustrated. "How the hell did that happen?!" -Dr.Y yells.

The next day Dr.Y is startled by the latest news. Unlagged has been made part of the game and the option to turn it off has been removed due to popular demand. There were just so many people who weren't near many good ping servers, they wanted all the nearest servers to have to run unlagged. The devs decided this would be ok with their new an improved unlagged which the majority of players seem to like. Dr.Y isn't one of the usual high pingers that make up the bulk of the tremulous community, so he doesn't matter.

[David]

How can I fuck up dodging if I don't see the human. He only comes around the corner on my monitor 210 ms after he shot and seen me on his.

That would only happen if your ping is 210.

@Eeeew Spiders
2000 ping = 2 seconds, and would probably time out.

And people seem to be incapable of reading.

[Warrior]

techhead
+1

WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get)
Where you shoot is where you hit something, in the moment you shot.
Who was in the place you shot is who will receive your bullet.

HP flows out faster as more people will hit you, because they will hit you when they see you.
You need to learn how to avoid that and escape alive.
Harder. Better? Different.


P.S.: Dretchs and Goon's Pounce Attack are like projectiles, so they fill my bullets category.

[Eeeew Spiders]

If you don't like it, leave it off on your own servers, and if you really don't like it, you can choose different servers to play on.

That's exactly the point that some of us are making. The desire was expressed to make Unlagged the default and stock setting. This is what is being challenged. Nobody is saying to flush Unlagged down the toilet. A lot of effort went into the design of it. I would fully support a notion that there should be some server where players can play that have no access to a tremulous server near by. I am just hoping that the servers I frequent with my low ping will not use Unlagged until the problems that have been discussed here have been solved.

@Nux: bah, you beat my 2000ms example with your coffee time ping example:P

would probably time out. And people seem to be incapable of reading.

my error in calculation, make that 12000ms in my example. It just illustrates what is happening if you stretch the Unlagged idea. And about incabable of reading:

Now to come back to a more realistic setting, simply reduce the lagging players ping while at the same time reducing the distance he has to move to get you in your sight.

to your answer about time out.

phenomenas become more clear if you test the theories in extremes.

[techhead]

Nice use of extremes, but it proves a valid point none-the-less. However, unlagged probably should be implemented with a sv_maxrewindtime. Zero would naturally mean no limit, and as long as your ping is less than the set limit, you would experience unlagged as it is now. People with pings higher than that would only be given that much slack, no more. A much more friendly alternative to sv_maxping.

On a side note, I imagined that the one with the doctorate would also be the one living in Antarctica.

[Evlesoa]

basically put...

You have 2 pipes

=====
and _____

Can you guess unlagged? Its the second one

Would you prefer the water to leak, and drown you, or would you prefer the water to stay in the pipe of your house? Thats what i thought kthxbye

[Dracone]

Shhhh, there ARE emo people in this world.  :roll: The answer isn't the same for EVERYONE.  :roll:  :roll:  :roll:  :roll:

[kevlarman]

there already is a limit on how much unlagged will rewind time to calculate if your attack hit anything (in fact there's 2, the second and more useful one being sv_maxping): the server only keeps player positions for 500ms, nothing it can do nothing beyond that.

[Nux]

Yes there should be- and is -a limit to how far back it rewinds. The kind of extreme situations that would occur with very high pings and very long rewinds have now been avoided! Hoorah!

There's another extreme situation though. This one hasn't been avoided.. For you see, Dr.Y achieved his doctorate in neural science many years back. He studied the limits to how fast a brain can process various concepts and situations. Over time, he found that the constant challenging and testing of his own mind had significantly increased his awareness of events in a short space of time.

Nowadays, Dr.Y puts his skills to very good use. He can be found pwning n00bs any time over at Server-Z. Dr.Y notices the discrepancies brought on by lag and unlag as if they were played in slow motion. To Dr.Y, the lag time is an eternity. When the servers gives Dr.Y an eternity of false information which eventually costs him and aids the lagger, Dr.Y feels a little upset.

As for Mr.X.. He doesn't really care very much about tremulous. He's too busy surfing icicle mountains and ploughing his snow fields.

@Eeeew Spiders:

[Eeeew Spiders]

Nux has a very valid point! Has Unlagged been tested at all by -20°C? :-D
____

So max rollback time is currently 200ms, which is 1/5 of a second.
- How often can a person change aiming directions in this time given a high sens mouse which most of the very good players have?
- How many times can a player turn around 180° in 1/5 of a second?
- How far does a player needs to be away from a corner to make it around that corner in 1/5 of a second?

How much for all the above when rollback time is 1/2 of a second (500ms). And how much for all that with a rollback time of 1/10 of a second (100ms)

[jal]

Unlagged is always a good thing, but... players need to patient. Implementing the system is easy, but fine tunning it so it really feels right requires quite a time.
Also, the unlagged implementation has to be restricted. The goal is not making people with 300 ping play as in LAN. It is to help people with already decent pings and tie the playing field for them. The backwards reconciliation needs to be limited to a max or 100/150 latency to prevent very high pingers producing glitches on low pingers. People trying to play with bigger pings are already in too bad conditions to bother helping them further than removing 100 from their delay.

I should say, to explain why I talk like this: I implemented the antilag system in Warsow. It's not an unlagged port. I did it from scratch, and didn't even read unlagged docs, but it's the same concept. So I have experience. Writting it was easy and didn't take more than a few days. It took 3 Warsow releases until the fine tunning took it to how it feels now, which is the first one I consider feeling "right".

I must add. I played in a Trem server with unlagged. I think it was a balance mod server, and was quite a while ago. It didn't feel good at all, but the system was working. Very far from ET-like levels, but it's just a matter of keeping evolving it.
Trem is harder to fine-tune than ET, tho. It's more similar to Warsow's difficulty (ET is all bullets, which are the easiest to antilag). I'll make some recommendations based on my experience. Feel free to ignore the following

- Reconciliating method is not always good for projectiles, specially those with splash damage. I'd recommend to use a pre-stepping method for Lucy balls (spawn the lucy shot forward by the compensation latency).

- But sometimes it does work good for the fast flying ones without splashdamage. I'd backwards reconciliate pulse rifle.
If you backwards reconciliate a projectile, it is a good idea to hack it's position forward by the latency only for the transmission, so the other clients see it in the position which will damage them. This projectile offseting would require to modify the entity writting routine, tho, so it can't be mod based.

- Try to keep the latency compensation values smooth, at both client and server. Some averaging of the last ones does help to achieve a consistant feeling.

- Don't hesitate to add an arbitrary nudge cvar on the server side to fine tune the antilag. Latency precission is impossible, and some manual tunning may end up being the only way. Also, perfect antilag may end up feeling like you must shoot after the enemy to hit (Q3 engine has a delay even on listen server), so the server may need to put back this delay to feel natural.

[Eeeew Spiders]

jal, i find your post very informative, thanks.

I'd recommend to use a pre-stepping method for Lucy balls (spawn the lucy shot forward by the compensation latency).

Wouldn't this give a player less time to dodge a lucy from a high pinger than a lucy from a low pinger? On the other hand a lucy may be slow enough for not making much difference. Different though with pulse, where you could have been pulsed before you see the energy bolt leave the weapon.
And with the lucy, what happens when you stand exactly infront of the lucy weapon. Would the energy bolt spawn behind you?

[Computer[SU]]

Honestly, I think unlagged is not a very big deal and it's just turned into the de facto excuse for dying in an embarrassing way.  Every day I see some long-time players run across a mass of humans and when they die in a hail of bullets, it's "OMFG unlagged."

We should conduct a test for all the players that complain about unlagged - have them play for ten minutes in a given server with players who have average pings (100-150) and then ask them whether they were playing in unlagged or not.  For all their complaining, I bet you they would not even have any clue.

The only reason people ask "is this server unlagged?" is so they can bitch about it when they die.

I also don't understand why people think unlagged favors humans necessarily.  Aliens aim and lead too.  In fact, every attack in Trem is an aimed, timed attack.  Aliens even have projectile attacks as well (snipe, pounce).  Regardless of how much you hate unlagged, I don't think there's really much sense in saying it unfairly favors one side over the other.  Just because you would conventionally think of aiming as more important to firing standard weapons doesn't mean that humans get more help from unlagged.

[Eeeew Spiders]

"]...it's just turned into the de facto excuse for dying in an embarrassing way...
The only reason people ask "is this server unlagged?" is so they can bitch about it when they die.

Computer[SU], you are basing your reasons on quite false assumptions you make about people posting here.

"]I also don't understand why people think unlagged favors humans necessarily.

Nobody says it favors a certain race, again you make false assumptions and misinterpret what has been said just to make your point. The complaint is that a low pinger has less time to react to moves of a high pinger than to moves of a low pinger when unlagged is on and a tyrant/goon/hitscanweapon (or anything else that is being credited a kill due to the unrolling mechanism) is involved. Read up.

And people seem to be incapable of reading.

Actually i am really starting to agree with you there

[[A]]

Unlagged made me do one conclusion :

The players who has a natural ability to prevent enemy's movement or are training to dodge, don't like it because they are always dead in the past with a fucking weird sensation of an alien watching in another side. These kind of people generally don't have any problems to aim by managing their own ping. In one word, they only see disadvantages in unlagged.

The players who has a natural hability to be static and die everytime by good aliens don't see any differences with or without unlagged about dodging (haha they don't dodge so it's normal). But because they sux at aim by managing their own ping, the are in love with unlagged which it make them hit enemies they couldn't dream about.

So i describe here 2 kind of people :

Players who can aim, dodge and manage their own ping==> good players
Players who don't dodge, can't aim (without unlagged), prefer to give their own ping to the opponent than managing them self ==> erm ...

You can easy deduce for what kind of players unlagged was made.

Unlagged is the easiest way to feel good in tremulous but ... it's just a feeling imho.

Unlagged will never emulates a lan sensation ...


Btw i can say what i want, i stopped playing xD, but a last flame to show to people that unlagged is for nubs was a good candy !

[Computer[SU]]

Computer[SU], you are basing your reasons on quite false assumptions you make about people posting here.

I don't know what false assumptions you are talking about.  Unless anyone who posted here has asked "is this server unlagged?" then I didn't even say anything about them.

Nobody says it favors a certain race, again you make false assumptions and misinterpret what has been said just to make your point. The complaint is that a low pinger has less time to react to moves of a high pinger than to moves of a low pinger when unlagged is on and a tyrant/goon/hitscanweapon (or anything else that is being credited a kill due to the unrolling mechanism) is involved. Read up.

Look man, I didn't call you out here, I said "people think unlagged favors humans," not "posters in this thread think unlagged favors humans."  Yes, over my many months of playing Trem I have heard lots of people say that unlagged favors humans.  I was addressing those people, not you.

[Warrior]

[A],
When you play with 200+ ping on a server *without unlagged* as being a human, you can't dodge a goon with 30- ping; you can only run away and die (unless we are talking about a very noob goon). However, I suppose you never played with such ping, or are forgetting the times you did.

[Eeeew Spiders]

@Computer[SU]: apologies then for my tone, i misinterpreted your statement for being thread related.

[A],
When you play with 200+ ping on a server *without unlagged* as being a human, you can't dodge a goon with 30- ping; you can only run away and die (unless we are talking about a very noob goon). However, I suppose you never played with such ping, or are forgetting the times you did.

Computer[SU] posted something about this which he unfortunately deleted right after. Unfortunately because i agreed fully with Computer[SU] comment there.

[Iltama]

One thing I hate about unlagged is that both humans and aliens have much higher accuracy % (well it's the idea : P). It's no fun when most of the players just hit all the time and fights end up quick, dodgeing is harder and some amazing survivals and long fights happen less frequently. Quick/less surprising fights are just more boring. For me, unlagged removes a big part of the *tremulous* feeling.

[Computer[SU]]

Computer[SU] posted something about this which he unfortunately deleted right after. Unfortunately because i agreed fully with Computer[SU] comment there.

Yeah, I did delete part because I didn't realize how long the thread was and I was commenting on a post that was in the middle.  NP.

[Eeeew Spiders]

One thing I hate about unlagged is that both humans and aliens have much higher accuracy % (well it's the idea : P).

Not sure if it has higher accuracy, good players have not much problems with adapting to higher pings. However it becomes harder to survive when you rely on predicting your opponents moves, which is vital for surving on close combat dodging. So the conclusion is exactly how you said it, the game has less close combat dodge dances and more rush and hunt tactics due to unlagged. I will not go into a discussion about which of the play style is more leet. Different people like the game for different reasons, and depending on your play style Unlagged has greater or less impact on your game. And for those that love dancing with goons it will be a great miss if Unlagged becomes the standard. However I am open for giving more time for trying to to tweak values as Jal suggested so that Unlagged has less of its downside.

[Nux]

[A],
When you play with 200+ ping on a server *without unlagged* as being a human, you can't dodge a goon with 30- ping; you can only run away and die (unless we are talking about a very noob goon). However, I suppose you never played with such ping, or are forgetting the times you did.

So, I'm guessing you prefer the unlagged alternative. Where the laggy human sees the goon as stationary in a lag spike and takes advantage of this occurance by filling him full of whatever ammunition he has. It doesn't make a bit of difference whether the goon dodged or not. The human hit the goon on his screen so suddenly that's the reality for everyone who doesn't have some crazy ping. Why exactly should the higher pingers get to shoot at false target positions and yet hit?

Oh, and I'd just like to point out that the poll is currently at 22 - 22. The fact that exactly half of the people so far aren't happy with unlagged I think deserves attention. This is NOT the kind of statistic which should have people incorperate unlagged in it's present form as an unconditional factor.

[[A]]

Ah, you forget something, the people who are supporting unlagged with the strongest convictions are not the people who play with 200 ping ... All that kind of people who say that unlagged is "so cool", they need it to play with 40 ping !!!!!

When i m playing with more than 20 ping, i feel the lag and i don't hit what i m aiming. But with unlagged it's different, i can now good play with 40 ping !

It's more less what said me the strongest partisan of unlagged in my community.

Excuse me but when i read that i just think ... "Nub"

Maybe unlagged could be used to make possible matches between 2 continents ... But to use unlagged between members of a same country or continent is just a joke and a noob way.

"ONOZ 70 PING, I NEED MY UNLAGGEDZZZZZ"

[David]

The level of stubborn headedness in this thread is beyond belief.
Nothing useful is ever going to come of this thread, so I think it should be locked, and maybe stuck, as an example of how not to have a debate.

[Computer[SU]]

The level of stubborn headedness in this thread is beyond belief.
Nothing useful is ever going to come of this thread, so I think it should be locked, and maybe stuck, as an example of how not to have a debate.

+1

[jal]

I'd recommend to use a pre-stepping method for Lucy balls (spawn the lucy shot forward by the compensation latency).

Wouldn't this give a player less time to dodge a lucy from a high pinger than a lucy from a low pinger? On the other hand a lucy may be slow enough for not making much difference. Different though with pulse, where you could have been pulsed before you see the energy bolt leave the weapon.

Yes, the first lucy-ball step would be bigger for high pingers. But, from our tests, we found this is the method that feels more natural for rockets, and lucy is basically a very slow rocket, so it should be even better for it.
Antilag systems are basically trading systems after all. They remove the latency from one place just to put it at a harmless one. This is also why it should never compensate for more than 150 pings. The artifacts produced at the other side of the trade become bigger than the beneficts.

And with the lucy, what happens when you stand exactly infront of the lucy weapon. Would the energy bolt spawn behind you?

Well, no, you cast a trace from the player to the spawning position. Q3 already does this, it just needs to change the distance by the latency compensation one.

[Eeeew Spiders]

Then we can just ignore these losers who dont understand it and are just pissed they lost there unfair advantage.

The level of stubborn headedness in this thread is beyond belief.
Nothing useful is ever going to come of this thread, so I think it should be locked, and maybe stuck, as an example of how not to have a debate.

You sure that your way of debating is how everything else would go better?
As I understand debating, its about trying to understand what the point of the other is before dismissing or dissing it. You have provided no additional understanding to the matter nor seem to have a notion what the problem we have with unlagged is about. Some more knowledgeable do recognize that problem as a problem and have
- offered solutions in how to make the downside have less of an impact on current play styles
- offered different perspectives on how to weigh the downside vs its benefits

With those that have contributed in a constructive way (and this is not only by a just a view posters) I think the discussion is quite fruitful. Those that can only comment in the way "you are dumb cause i like this better" should be simply ignored, unlike I am doing right now with this post. And I don't mean only you in particular, but all that have your line of argumentation on both sides of the Unlagged issue.

[kevlarman]

Unlagged is always a good thing, but... players need to patient. Implementing the system is easy, but fine tunning it so it really feels right requires quite a time.
Also, the unlagged implementation has to be restricted. The goal is not making people with 300 ping play as in LAN. It is to help people with already decent pings and tie the playing field for them. The backwards reconciliation needs to be limited to a max or 100/150 latency to prevent very high pingers producing glitches on low pingers. People trying to play with bigger pings are already in too bad conditions to bother helping them further than removing 100 from their delay.

there was a patch to limit how far back unlagged would rewind time to calculate if you hit, but i think that limiting the ping of players is the job of sv_maxping.

I should say, to explain why I talk like this: I implemented the antilag system in Warsow. It's not an unlagged port. I did it from scratch, and didn't even read unlagged docs, but it's the same concept. So I have experience. Writting it was easy and didn't take more than a few days. It took 3 Warsow releases until the fine tunning took it to how it feels now, which is the first one I consider feeling "right".

the backward reconcilliation was implemented from scratch by tjw (and possibly inspired by code in etpub). he decided against including the client prediction part (so weapon firing animations (and blood squirts) play instantly instead of waiting for the event from the server), which may be a big part of why people think it doesn't "feel" right.

I must add. I played in a Trem server with unlagged. I think it was a balance mod server, and was quite a while ago. It didn't feel good at all, but the system was working. It will take quite some time to reach ET-like levels, but it's just a matter of keeping evolving it.
Trem is harder to fine-tune than ET, tho. It's more similar to Warsow's difficulty (ET is all bullets, which are the easiest to antilag). I'll make some recommendations based on my experience. Feel free to ignore the following

- Reconciliating method is not always good for projectiles, specially those with splash damage. I'd recommend to use a pre-stepping method for Lucy balls (spawn the lucy shot forward by the compensation latency).

only hitscan weapons are backward reconciled for hittests, projectiles are nudged forward to their real position client side, but that doesn't actually affect gameplay (well, it lets you dodge much more easily, but that's not what i meant)

- But sometimes it does work good for the fast flying ones without splashdamage. I'd backwards reconciliate pulse rifle.
If you backwards reconciliate a projectile, it is a good idea to hack it's position forward by the latency only for the transmission, so the other clients see it in the position which will damage them. This projectile offseting would require to modify the entity writting routine, tho, so it can't be mod based.

i think backward reconciling any projectiles is a bad idea (for the same reason Neil decided against it in q3 unlagged)

- Try to keep the latency compensation values smooth, at both client and server. Some averaging of the last ones does help to achieve a consistant feeling.

do you mean for backward reconcilliation? the server doesn't deal with latencies directly, it uses ucmd->attacktime (i think that's the variable name anyway, been a while since i messed with it). for projectile nudge i hijacked the 2 second floating average of the lagometer.

- Don't hesitate to add an arbitrary nudge cvar on the server side to fine tune the antilag. Latency precission is impossible, and some manual tunning may end up being the only way. Also, perfect antilag may end up feeling like you must shoot after the enemy to hit (Q3 engine has a delay even on listen server), so the server may need to put back this delay to feel natural.

once again, because ucmd->attacktime is used, this shouldn't make a difference.

[Eeeew Spiders]

Unlagged is always a good thing, but... players need to patient. Implementing the system is easy, but fine tunning it so it really feels right requires quite a time.
Also, the unlagged implementation has to be restricted. The goal is not making people with 300 ping play as in LAN. It is to help people with already decent pings and tie the playing field for them. The backwards reconciliation needs to be limited to a max or 100/150 latency to prevent very high pingers producing glitches on low pingers. People trying to play with bigger pings are already in too bad conditions to bother helping them further than removing 100 from their delay.

there was a patch to limit how far back unlagged would rewind time to calculate if you hit, but i think that limiting the ping of players is the job of sv_maxping.

Aren't backwards reconciliation limit and limiting the ping two completely unrelated limits as long as maxping > maxreconciliation? When i understand correctly there is already a maxreconciliation, only that without the patch you mentioned its not changeable.

the server only keeps player positions for 500ms, nothing it can do nothing beyond that.