Official forums for BZFlag.org

I am curious. How would you folks define high lag/jitter? What ranges would you say are reasonable?

Lately, my lag has been pretty reasonable (for me with dialup - 300ms - 400ms, or even 300ms - 350ms), but I've been kicked quite lot for high lag.

So I am wondering what you would consider acceptable.

Thanks

under 300

between 200 and 300, you start to see alot of shoot throughs

lag kicks are usually set at 300 -350.

for official matches, i try not to play against some one with over 200 lag

I would say under 250 is acceptable.

For me being in Australia, my lag is always between 220-360 unless i choose an Aussie server which then its drops to 70-80.

SO what i consider to be reasonable lag is somewhere between 250-300. I dont even mind people with 320 but as you start hitting 350 it starts to become a concern.

If your Lag + Jitter together reach 400 then you have a problem. Im seeing more and more people with jitter of up to 50ms. Reasonable jitter would be about 15-20 Anything higher than 30-35 it starts to become a worry.

for me 1-3 jitter is reasonable, certainly not 20-23, that's when the tank starts to appear to jump around the map.

Reasonable, and average jitter i see, it 1-10ms. Reasonable lag would be anywhere from 350 down. I don't see many shoot through effects at 200-300... Most shoot through times I have experienced was when someone missed and says "LAGGER!"
PS: The best lag I have seen for myself was 30ms at Quol, and 20 on Quol for someone else.

because of the way bzflag works, it is very sensitive to lag. It does not do any sort of lag compensation, so lag that is reasonable for other games can seem bad for bzflag. This is also compounded by the fact that the "I died" computations are done on the client for the player being shot, and he sees shots that are off by both his lag and the shooters lag. It all adds up to decent sized spacial discrepancies very fast.

JeffM2501 wrote:It all adds up to decent sized spacial discrepancies very fast.

This is why it's worth checking the lag of players from time to time, so you can shoot early/late dependent on your+their lag.

Teppic
that may be a bad practice to do, 2.1.x does lag compensation and will do that visual "leading" for you by putting the tank where we think it is right now. It makes 2.1.x feel a little different from 2.0.x, but it is more accurate for more players.

Jeff, so if I'm getting that right, the hugely jumpy tanks we get occasionally now will be gone, but sometimes if we shoot the tank image we see, it won't be a kill?

Of course, that'd be only in extreme situations.

it depends on how far we get. At present there is a higher likelyhood of a tank being in the same place on all screens as the place you see it at. If more work gets done, then hopefully we can have the kill detections be done on the server, then there is a lot more likelyhood of the tank you see a shot hit exploding.

At the current time ( 2.0.x ) unless a tank is stopped, there is nearly no chance that the tank will be in the same place as you see it at.

Lag is best kept under 300, but is tolerable up through 400~500 with low jitter. Jitter above 20 or 30 is really nasty, though.

Lowest lag I've seen was me ( ) playing anywhere on Planet MoFo's old San Diego server from my dorm connection... I would get 15ms ping, no joke. People would notice and assume it was my server, and I was playing from the same local network.

lag under 180-200 and jitter under 10 is fine for me, above you get mad cause you see bullets through

It all depends on what you're used to.

What I would call reasonable is lag up to 50ms and jitter up to 3ms. With worse values the game has a different feeling, so there is impact on gameplay. This is especially visible when fighting against two opponents where one has 20+-0 and another one with 150+-3. With low shot counts you really need to know at which tank you're shooting at in this case.

With more bullets the connections get less important because then one can just "spray" bullets and therefore dodging gets nearly impossible.

L4m3r wrote: Lowest lag I've seen was me ( ) playing anywhere on Planet MoFo's old San Diego server from my dorm connection... I would get 15ms ping, no joke. People would notice and assume it was my server, and I was playing from the same local network.

I get about 20ms just playing on localhost. 15ms seems like a dream. Some day...

The Vaxorcist
that is probably due to your frame rate. aka fake lag, the time between drawing updates

JeffM2501 wrote:The Vaxorcist
that is probably due to your frame rate. aka fake lag, the time between drawing updates

Yeah, probably.

Thanks

On this topic, what would make your lag suddenly go from maybe 80 or so to over 3000? I have no other programs running that should do this. It goes up and back down over about ten minutes, and I don't do anything that would cause it.

Concept_01 wrote:On this topic, what would make your lag suddenly go from maybe 80 or so to over 3000? I have no other programs running that should do this. It goes up and back down over about ten minutes, and I don't do anything that would cause it.

These are called "lag spikes". I believe they are caused by irregularities in the network. Lagstats are averaged unless I'm mistaken, which is why your lag doesn't jump right back down to where it was before the spike.

I would prefer to play on a server that kicks players with lag larger than 250 and consistent jitter larger than 10, but I dont know the "official social rules".

Actually I seldomly ask players to leave because of lag, but I don't like to play with very lagged players either. Life is simpler if the server does the kicking.

Social rules are a sign of inadequate server settings