Questions about DB/UR3 antilag/ping/hitboxes

(avidCow) #21

I don’t know what they’ve done lately, but I notice now that there is sometimes a noticeable delay between shooting someone and the kill registering, especially when I feel like I missed the last couple of shots before the other person ducked behind a corner. I swear this is a recent thing…

(darlingClaymore) #22

I somehow once killed people with 900ms, they sucked.

(Amerika) #23

I have noticed this too. Especially with the burst rifles. I’ll kill people, they will visually go down but the kill message is delayed as if my ping is higher. Two issues you have when playing with a high ping are jumping off of walls gets weird and kill messages are delayed. Now, regardless of my ping, kill messages seem slightly delayed. It doesn’t seem to affect gameplay but I don’t know why it started happening recently.

(Amerika) #24

@avidCow

So, I think I figured this one out. I record a bunch of gameplay and put it up on YT. I went and got a Chrome addon called Frame by Frame and I stepped an old video through a couple of kills compared to a new video. I found that the kill message colors and the timing has changed a little bit.

On the older videos I found that the delay between the kill message popping up in the kill log, which I found is literally instant (and weapons pop up real big first then shrink down and start to show text which I didn’t notice before since it’s only one frame), and the kill message that pops up near the center of your screen is about 3-5 frames. This is consistent between the newer and the older videos. However, on the older video you can see things becoming clearer and notice the message easily by frame 6 or 7 where in the new video it’s not really clear until frame 14, 15 or 16. Also, they made the kill message have a slightly lighter and more transparent background and, at least for me, isn’t as easy to notice. Especially when the animation is still coming up. The darker black box around the bright red name from the old videos is easier for my brain to see.

So there is a delay of up to 16 frames of animation before the message you see in the center is clear with the game currently. Each frame of animation is 16.67 milliseconds at 60FPS (what I record videos at) which means there is 256 milliseconds of potential delay before your brain sees a clear message which translates to just over 1/4 of a second. Basically, enough time for most human brains to notice there is a delay.

Compare that to being able to visually see that same message in just 6-7 frames after you killed the guy in the past and it’s a significant delay and probably why people are noticing it (and potentially attributing it to the game having more lag even though that isn’t the case).

So it’s a visual timing/color issue. It would be nice if the message in the center started coming up at the same time as the message in the kill log. Also, this was done in about 10 minutes of research and I didn’t analyze tons of kills so the numbers might not be exact. I did look at enough to ballpark average these figures though.

(avidCow) #25

Good work.

(sneak) #26

We got detective Amerika on the case

(B_Montiel) #27

I’ve found a quick way to cut small clips out of recordings (I don’t have a tremendous upload speed). Here’s a very weird situation I faced two days ago. Fletcher sticky killed me with no other clue than the fact that he switched to the sticky bomb’s remote and the final result. I disabled the sound (I don’t want you to hear me scream), but there were no sound footprints either. As far as I can remember, the server was doing fine at this moment. I don’t know if it’s visible on youtube due to the quality, but there were no sticky hanging around there, and he did not glue one on me prior to this.

I don’t know how it is possible. And that’s the kind of inconsistencies I tend to meet quite often overall (I won’t upload older records, just to remain consistent to the different updates/hotfixes).

(sneak) #28

Saying that “the sound is there but I disabled the sound” isn’t very helpful.

(Amerika) #29

[quote=“B. Montiel;112030”]I’ve found a quick way to cut small clips out of recordings (I don’t have a tremendous upload speed). Here’s a very weird situation I faced two days ago. Fletcher sticky killed me with no other clue than the fact that he switched to the sticky bomb’s remote and the final result. I disabled the sound (I don’t want you to hear me scream), but there were no sound footprints either. As far as I can remember, the server was doing fine at this moment. I don’t know if it’s visible on youtube due to the quality, but there were no sticky hanging around there, and he did not glue one on me prior to this.

I don’t know how it is possible. And that’s the kind of inconsistencies I tend to meet quite often overall (I won’t upload older records, just to remain consistent to the different updates/hotfixes). [/quote]

Well, on frame 17 he does start to switch from his shotgun to the remote. Then you kill him on frame 29. You then die on frame 38 (~150ms) with exactly 90HP. There is some input leniency on the stickies and there is an explosion delay so him dying while also still killing you works out in regards to timing.

He didn’t have time to throw a sticky, switch and then detonate it I don’t think. But he did have time to switch to a remote and detonate. Since a sticky that isn’t stuck to you causes 80 damage you definitely had a sticky on you since you died with 90HP left.

So there are two things possible here. Either he stuck you without your knowledge at some point before the video starts which makes sense given what is seen. Or he had some major packet loss but the game kept going and on his screen had enough time to throw a sticky and detonate it as you came out the door and then the server agreed with his clients view of how events unfolded.

It’s possible that there were two stickies planted in parts of the box geometry which hides stickies too. You can do that with mines in some areas of the map.

That’s my best guestimate.

(3N1GM4) #30

I’m going to assume he had stuck you while you were coming through that hall. I can’t see a sticky anywhere near where that explosion is coming from, and you are practically right on top of it.

The way it explodes after he dies is probably from clicking it, dieing, and then it exploding.

Though I have noticed (as I main fletcher) sometimes it seems like even if you die a few ms before you click it will still detonate the stickies.

(B_Montiel) #31

Again, I maintain that he did not stick me at any time before. I carefully checked myself. No “plop” stick sounds whatsoever by the way. And the explosion location drawn by tracer is somewhere in mid-air near me.

If I disabled the sound is mainly because there’s nothing interesting in this field. Gunfight, sound of him taking the remote, explosion, me doing the raging roar (I record my mic and voip because we have some funny talks on our ts).
I’m not trying to mislead you. Everything valuable for this case in my whole 1 min footage is held in this 4 sec segment. I would not have uploaded this if I had a proper idea how what happened after analysing the footage myself a good dozen times.

@Amerika : I totally agree with you. Your analysis on the situation is clear and thorough. But I can guarantee that there’s no sign of a possible sticky glued to me. So my only thought is that there were a massive packet loss. Server not considering his weapon switch, from his point of view he throws me a sticky. From the server and my point of view he fires his shotgun and removes 20 hp. He then takes his remote, activates it. His client sends a hit from a glued sticky bomb. I suppose that either the server or the receiving client is responsible for damage accounting. It receives the sticky detonation information. 20 + 90, I’m dead.

(Amerika) #32

You had 90hp when you died. It’s pretty clear when you frame by frame it. And a single sticky that isn’t stuck to you only does 80 damage so you would have survived with 10hp if it was a single sticky and it was on the ground (unless there were two but it didn’t look like two explosions). So either it’s the packet loss situation and you did get stuck but couldn’t see/hear it or the stickies were there on the ground but your client didn’t render them due to the weird geometry issues that causes stickies, mines, grenades etc. to disappear yet still explode.

He definitely switched to a remote from his shotgun and detonated stickies so he thought he had something to detonate. So I’m sort of leaning towards invisible stickies more than I am packet loss/server rollback. But who knows.

Also, you can’t rely on the sounds in DB since a lot of sounds get overwritten by other sound events. It’s almost as if the game only supports a few sound channels and once you exceed the number of sounds compared to sound channels you get one overwritten. This happens a lot with airstrikes I know. There are lost sounds I notice all the time but I’m so used to them I don’t really pay much attention to them anymore. They have done a ton with the mixing on the game but I don’t know what exactly so it would not surprise me if you didn’t hear the stickies because of this as well.

It’s kind of fun to try and figure out but ultimately I don’t know if we’ll really get anywhere haha. At least it’s a decent mental exercise with the potential of maybe exposing a bug to be fixed.

(B_Montiel) #33

The full spawn to death sequence :


(The fletcher behind the EV is the fletcher I face in the corridor right after)

An older sequence (21/10/15) that I found significant in this regard :


(Phoenix is the only friendly medic around, sparks is in the main alley near the ev at this time)

Either way, those bugs may be due to two things in my opinion : packet loss or too low tickrate. The result is the same at the end (missing anims, actions not being properly rendered), but servers won’t be the direct culprit in the second case. And, as far as I know UE3 engine, that’s totally possible that it skips info when sending packets.

(3N1GM4) #34

This seems like it may be the opposite side of the coin to stickies appearing that i hit a player, then having it end up behind them.

It looks pretty clear that he just threw a sticky when you came through the door. hands -> shotgun -> hands or sticky -> shotgun -> detonator. Your client may have either already rendered it, or had yet to, but then bam, he stuck you on his side, but not yours.

(avidCow) #35

[quote=“3N1GM4;111008”]The biggest thing I can’t stand, and I don’t know if its lag compensation, client side detection, etc. But it’s player models / guns not reflecting what the player is actually doing. Being perpendicular to a player (facing their side) while they shoot me but it looks like they are facing 90° away from me.

Actually seeing what the player is doing is a massive part of dodging, and when its completely inaccurate its frustrating.[/quote]

Yes, this is awful. I’ve only ever seen this with player pinging around > 200 - 250ms. SD need to implement ping caps as a QOL change. The other day there was a Phantom player pinging 400+ and warping all over the place while chopping people up. He seemed to enjoy the frustration he was causing.

(sneak) #36

The problem without having any compensation or limits is you can easily use software to add artificial lag to your gameplay just enough that it benefits you.

([ *O.C.B.* ] Wildcard) #37

@sneak With regards to the UE3 Engine, as I’ve used the Unreal Engine since UE2 (currently use UE4), I feel I could give some insight into potential bottlenecks on the engine itself:

  1. The Unreal Engine unlike most of the others I’ve run into has always been most heavily
    dependant on the power of your CPU (and is by nature a CPU-intensive game engine)
    a) The GPU is rarely touched by the engine, however it will make heavy use of Visual
    Random Access Memory (aka. Visual RAM or VRAM). It is still a minor bottleneck that
    rarely becomes problematic, but due to its presence is worth noting.

  2. Your total RAM will be a major bottleneck in conjunction with your CPU as they are often a
    paired issue with this engine. With UE3 32bit Operating Systems should go with the
    maximum 4Gb of RAM to minimize problems on that front however I’ve noticed that it
    does support the 64bit Operating Systems RAM Capacities so if you have one go for 8Gb
    minimum of RAM.

Beyond those points it mostly boils down to three things:

  1. The quality of your internet connection

  2. Issues existing from the Server-side connection or Internet Service Provider (ISP)

 or
  1. Interference between you and the Server you are connecting to (this particular one I could
    go into more detail on but is a big ol’ mess of a topic for another day).
(sneak) #38

[quote=“Wildcard;112663”]@sneak With regards to the UE3 Engine, as I’ve used the Unreal Engine since UE2 (currently use UE4), I feel I could give some insight into potential bottlenecks on the engine itself:

  1. The Unreal Engine unlike most of the others I’ve run into has always been most heavily
    dependant on the power of your CPU (and is by nature a CPU-intensive game engine)
    a) The GPU is rarely touched by the engine, however it will make heavy use of Visual
    Random Access Memory (aka. Visual RAM or VRAM). It is still a minor bottleneck that
    rarely becomes problematic, but due to its presence is worth noting.

  2. Your total RAM will be a major bottleneck in conjunction with your CPU as they are often a
    paired issue with this engine. With UE3 32bit Operating Systems should go with the
    maximum 4Gb of RAM to minimize problems on that front however I’ve noticed that it
    does support the 64bit Operating Systems RAM Capacities so if you have one go for 8Gb
    minimum of RAM.

Beyond those points it mostly boils down to three things:

  1. The quality of your internet connection

  2. Issues existing from the Server-side connection or Internet Service Provider (ISP)

 or
  1. Interference between you and the Server you are connecting to (this particular one I could
    go into more detail on but is a big ol’ mess of a topic for another day).[/quote]

I’m not really sure why you’re saying this stuff, it has nothing to do with the questions I asked. I fully understand issue how issue #3 works and who these days builds computers with less than 8GB ram or a 32-bit OS? :smiley:

(3N1GM4) #39

[quote=“sneak;112788”][quote=“Wildcard;112663”]@sneak With regards to the UE3 Engine, as I’ve used the Unreal Engine since UE2 (currently use UE4), I feel I could give some insight into potential bottlenecks on the engine itself:

  1. The Unreal Engine unlike most of the others I’ve run into has always been most heavily
    dependant on the power of your CPU (and is by nature a CPU-intensive game engine)
    a) The GPU is rarely touched by the engine, however it will make heavy use of Visual
    Random Access Memory (aka. Visual RAM or VRAM). It is still a minor bottleneck that
    rarely becomes problematic, but due to its presence is worth noting.

  2. Your total RAM will be a major bottleneck in conjunction with your CPU as they are often a
    paired issue with this engine. With UE3 32bit Operating Systems should go with the
    maximum 4Gb of RAM to minimize problems on that front however I’ve noticed that it
    does support the 64bit Operating Systems RAM Capacities so if you have one go for 8Gb
    minimum of RAM.

Beyond those points it mostly boils down to three things:

  1. The quality of your internet connection

  2. Issues existing from the Server-side connection or Internet Service Provider (ISP)

 or
  1. Interference between you and the Server you are connecting to (this particular one I could
    go into more detail on but is a big ol’ mess of a topic for another day).[/quote]

I’m not really sure why you’re saying this stuff, it has nothing to do with the questions I asked. I fully understand issue how issue #3 works and who these days builds computers with less than 8GB ram or a 32-bit OS? :smiley: [/quote]

Well, it is a f2p game, so probably a lot of people run less than optimum setups.

(SiegeFace) #40

People also don’t understand what “EU” means when picking servers…wish there was some kind of interp setting for this game (if there is please tell me how to activate it, as I am sick of all the americans joining eu and shitting out the servers cant even melee someone who is standing still when the server is filled with high pingers)