When latency issues die, will MMOs change?

Graphics complexity has little, if any, bearing on network traffic and latency. MMOs are not streaming the bulk of their graphics over the wire, those are handled entirely client side.

The scalability issues that make 'twitch' gameplay difficult have to do with the number of concurrent connections -- the number of concurrent agents in the world whose data must be parsed and synchronized by the server, and then reported back to other concerned agents, et cetera.

In recent years, what with the availability and ubiquity of high-speed internet, this is becoming less of an issue (although still one that cannot be written off), and it is certainly possible to produce 'twitch' gameplay in a large scale environment. I think the reason you haven't seen so many is mostly down to market concerns.

Consider Blade and Soul, for example.

http://www.projectvisitor.com/

Latency depends to a non-negligible part on the speed of light which is approximately 150,000-190,000 km/s. Also, intermediate routers impose a delay as they queue and forward packets. You can increase the bandwidth almost trivially, but reducing latency is hard, if possible at all.

The speed of light is not likely to increase by a large amount any time soon, and as routers get more powerful, the amount of traffic going through them increases as well, so all in all I'd not expect a significant reduction of latency.

Umm, unless you can transmit packets faster than the speed of light, the issue of latency will always be there.

They're already pretty fast.

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Original post by Delphinus This may be why MMOs are mostly MMORPGs are never twitch-based.

Darkfall, baby. Just launched, and it certainly isn't perfect, but combat is a blast. PvP works really well, though PvE is still slightly out of sync. Every sword slash, arrow, and mana missile is aimed by the player, very much like Oblivion or Mount & Blade.

I should explain my post.

Project Visitor is an MMORTS/FPS.

Planetside has been around for ages and it's a FPS with battles in the 1000's. It's not like the tech has been missing, there are several innovative technologies to overcome large scale FPS MMOs latency problems, but it's more question of market will bear.

Since Planetside wasn't a breakout hit like WOW or Everquest was, the market has been dominated by fantasy themed MMORPGs every since ( and since that gameplay model rarely needs twitch aspects people have been pushing the MMO tech in another direction, more server side scalability and greater game logic and content distribution support ).

Only now have the advances in standard FPS technology have pushed the bar closer and closer to "massive", has the tech money been spent on the twitch problem for FPS and other fast paced games on a MMO scale, ultimately it will be these FPS companies which will create the next generation of twitch based technology for MMOs and they will probably rule that market.

Companies like Sony, Blizzard, Turbine, Linden Labs, etc.. have no incentive to develop these technologies as their gameplay models are completely different.

-ddn

Latency is not an issue if you can sample, interpolate, and work asynchronously.

I don't think it's going to change much with the lessening of latency in the RPG genre. Most of these games are just graphical MUDs, which in turn are based on turn based RPGs.

As for other genres, have you heard of Massive Action Game?

Latency is not a problem that can be fixed by having less data sent over the line.

There are two aspects of networks that you need to know:
Bandwidth: the amount of data you can send in a given time.
Latency: The time it takes for any signal to travel between the source and destination of a data packet.

So a game with only a small amount of data that is being sent will not require a large bandwidth, but the amount of bandwidth needed does not have any effect on the latency.

If I have a high latency connection, then no matter how much I increase the bandwidth, I will not improve my latency.

Fast router switching and fibre optics decrease the latency (well with fibre optics you can also increase the bandwidth as well).

The reason that the Internet seems to be faster with modern network systems, is that the total size of the data needed to be transmitted is large. This means that if you have a large bandwidth, then you can push down a lot of data. However, if nothing was done to increase the latency, it will still take just as long for the first data packet to arrive.

Most MMOs do not actually send a lot of data in each packet, so this is not really a problem. The problem is the time it take that packet to reach the destination from the source, and since you have to send one packet form the client telling the servers to update, then the server has to send one back telling the client the details of the update, it take twice as long as the latency value indicates.

But yes, if you could ahve extremely fast routers switching, and optical fibre to the house (and to the server), you could have very low latencies and you would be able to have FPS like MMOs.

The problem is not that the best of the best isn't good enough, but surely that most people don't have the best of the best. It only takes one person to start lagging to ruin it for everyone. In an MMO, you increase the odds of finding a person who doesn't have enough bandwidth. Even in a 4v4 on Halo, you will get quite a few games with lag, extrapolate that to an environment with 50 or 60 people, it will be in a permanent state of lag. I am no expert, but surely this is the case?

It's not the case. Very few game or networking designs will punish everybody for one person's latency, although visuals may often be compromised. The simple problem with Delphinus's original thought is as already stated, that latency is not proportional to bandwidth, and that there are hard physical limits. Even a game that only needed to send 1 byte would still find the round trip time to be prohibitively long for something like Street Fighter if the other person is sufficiently far away.

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Original post by Edtharan Fast router switching and fibre optics decrease the latency (well with fibre optics you can also increase the bandwidth as well).

Actually, fiber optics increase latency.

Fiber optics have an index of refraction of about 1.45-1.48, which means that the speed of light is only about 68% the speed of radio waves or an electric current in a cable. It is not trivially possible to increase the speed of light, as fiber optics work on the principle of total internal reflection, which will fail if you use a medium with a much lower index of refraction (even if you knew how to produce one cheaply). Also, due to using total internal reflection, the actual path that the light has to travel is considerably longer than the cable (since it goes zig-zag on its way).

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Original post by Kylotan It's not the case. Very few game or networking designs will punish everybody for one person's latency, although visuals may often be compromised. The simple problem with Delphinus's original thought is as already stated, that latency is not proportional to bandwidth, and that there are hard physical limits. Even a game that only needed to send 1 byte would still find the round trip time to be prohibitively long for something like Street Fighter if the other person is sufficiently far away.

I think this just about sums up most people's thoughts; thanks to Kylotan and everyone else who replied. I'm no expert on networking, so that was an issue that I couldn't understand alone.

If we still have hard physical limits, then how do we increase speed to a reasonable level across the globe? Let alone when we colonise the Moon or Mars, which I'm fairly confident will happen within the 21st century.

This is presumably a problem on the cutting edge of network technology.

Surely quantum entanglement could solve this problem? Quantum computers are claimed to be only a decade or so away, so could we see high enough speeds for twitch-based games over the internet any time soon?

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Graphics complexity has little, if any, bearing on network traffic and latency. MMOs are not streaming the bulk of their graphics over the wire, those are handled entirely client side.

I knew that; otherwise I'd never put up with such large clients, since I find the gameplay so lacking!

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Consider Blade and Soul, for example.

That looks very interesting. I just hope that it works as well as it's advertised to. But that is certainly on my list of anticipated MMOs.

If it is as good as it appears, then we could be one step closer to 'The World' as portrayed through the .hack series.

[Edited by - Delphinus on March 4, 2009 11:14:43 AM]

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Original post by Delphinus If we still have hard physical limits, then how do we increase speed to a reasonable level across the globe?

But this is again where you have to be careful not to use the wrong term, and 'speed' is the wrong term here.

Which is fastest across 10 miles? A bus, or a Ferrari? The Ferrari, you'd say... unless you need to transport 20 people. Now which is fastest? The bus can make one trip and the Ferrari would have to make many more, taking longer. This is because it's not really speed we're interested in measuring but either latency (when does the first person arrive?) or throughput (what is the rate of people arriving).

To increase 'speed' therefore you always have more than one variable you can work with. There may be 8 seconds of latency in sending data to the Moon, but the data isn't being transmitted any more slowly. When it starts to arrive, it will arrive as quickly as it would if it was being transmitted to the next desk. It's just that the receipt starts 8 seconds later. And for probably 99% of applications this is perfectly acceptable.

Every time you get a new connection, it will take 8 seconds to connect properly and 8 seconds to reply. That's 16 seconds total. And unless you're sending and receiving data from all your clients, all the time, it will still have a 16-second blip. That's a ping of 16,000 at perfect connection. Great.

I believe there is some corollary to relativity equations that information can't travel faster than light, so quantum entanglement won't help there, though it is being used to detected ease dropping of data, due to quantum state collapse.

There are ways to reduce the appearance of lag using local authoritative servers with strong encryption and multiple levels of redundancy. IE, since your avatar would most likely only interact with people within the general proximity ( ie maybe ~30-50 ) people, a dynamic p2p network can be establish between those local group and proxy servers setup to run localize simulation of the game, redundantly then update that state to the true servers over much slower connection asynchronously.

The dynamic p2p network will mask interaction latency but all true authoritative operations still have to do a full round trip to the true transaction servers, but that should be infrequent if well designed.

Each little p2p island essentially is running its own local simulation with its own time frame, the trick is when these p2p island collide, merge, split etc.. These are just technical limitations, which given time can be solve i'm sure.

So its quite possible to do something like a large scale highly interactive simulation with some concession for true authoritative operations. There are a few games coming out using these techniques ( Huxley comes to mind ).

-ddn

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Surely quantum entanglement could solve this problem? Quantum computers are claimed to be only a decade or so away, so could we see high enough speeds for twitch-based games over the internet any time soon?

Quantum Computers exist now. They really do have them, however they are not all that powerful...

...yet.

But the really important thing is: they don't allow faster than light communications.

It is a very common misconception (promoted by cheesy sci-fi) that QM entanglement allows FTL communications. It doesn't.

Two particles can be entangled and then separated by millions of light years, and then examining the property of one determines the property of the other, despite the distance. This however, is not communication as the person examining the first particle can not determine what it is. Because they have no control over the result of the detection of the particle, which means that they can't influence what the other particle will be and so no information can be sent.

The only place where they have control over the particles is where they are created, but as the particles have to be sent form there, then the information still travels slower then the speed of light (or equal to if they are using photons as the particles).

So, although this would solve the problem if it did work like it does in Sci-fi, sadly, the world is not rally like that. :(

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Original post by Delphinus Every time you get a new connection, it will take 8 seconds to connect properly and 8 seconds to reply.

So, you don't reconnect each time. How do you think they communicate with space probes? They don't wait 16 seconds between frames. They have a constant stream of information coming in at normal speed, just 8 seconds delayed.