Cool info, thanks! How come game pads reduce latency in this scenario? I don’t understand how that works. I was actually looking forward to some old school mouse and keyboard play.
They don’t reduce latency, it’s just less apparent in some games. A mouse is accurate and fast. You will notice the instant it begins to lag. With a game pad, depending on the latency and the game, the fact that you’re using sticks to control the action means the interface might not feel as sluggish.
For me, playing the demo of the last warhammer 3rd person shooter/action game (forget the name) with a mouse and keyboard was impossible. The lag between mouse and game was too much to bear. I plugged in the controller, and even though I still noticed lag, it was at least playable that way.
Or in other words, YMMV.
OK gotcha. Thanks again!
Using the tech you’ve informed me of, this should be a solved problem, then. Just render in 360 degrees, send it to the client as a 360 map. Since moving the camera is really the only thing the mouse does without clicking besides possibly moving a cursor, this allows you to handle all mouse functions locally, other than clicking, which shouldn’t be any more laggy than pressing buttons on controllers.
Throw in a small amount of local rendering, like maybe your character (you might even be able to use sprites or sprite textures since most of the game would be on the server–plenty of room for high detailed bitmaps) and perhaps some general hitboxes that would allow a preliminary response while you are waiting on the full response, like maybe sparks, sound effects, or a reaction from your character. (or a jostle of the camera in first person.)
I still don’t see lag not being a problem until there is a large amount of infrastructure in place. Handling what you can locally would help tremendously, allowing hybrid based systems to come out relatively soon.
It’s not just the backbone that we need–this type of gaming screams for being able to play wirelessly.
The games that work best with this tech right now are slow paced games. Turned based strategy, puzzle games, etc. Lag isn’t usually a killer in these types of games. Of course, those types of games are usually the ones that will also run on any super cheap net books/tablets natively.