True Lagless Global Online Play Is Impossible
Let me tell you a little story about a thing called physics. There is a hard and fast maximum speed of the universe. That speed is the speed of light: 186,282 miles per second. Until we develop some sort of sci-fi techno magic that lets us somehow break that limit, we are constrained by it for all intents and purposes. Of course, this is nothing you don’t know if you didn’t take a high school physics class.
However, this is also a fact that is easily overlooked when people consider lag in online gaming. Specifically, this has become more of an issue now that fighting games have gone online, and a fraction of a second in a fighting game could spell the difference between a win or a loss. Playing a fighting game well requires instant reaction between input and input device, and online fighting games are constantly fighting the good fight to develop a net code that will let that happen, but I’m here to rain on everyone’s parade and say that the laws of physics ensure it won’t.
Let’s look at an example here. Future Justin Wong, living in New York, wants to play future Daigo Umehara, living in Tokyo, in a game of Street Fighter VII online. In the future, we have developed the technology to send information at the speed of light in a direct line from one point on the earth to another, and the PlayStation Box 720, the game console of choice at the time, has this capability built in. (The Nintendo Puu does not, but that’s par for the course for Nintendo.)
Tokyo, is approximately 6,760 miles or 10,878 kilometers from New York. If there was a Capcom server placed at the mid-point exactly between the two cities, than a button press would only have to travel half the distance to be processed by the software running on the service, and half the distance back to appear on Wong or Umehara’s TV screen. In short, the shortest distance that fighting game info could have to travel is the physical distance between two cities, no matter how strategically a central server is placed.
The speed of light, converted, is 299,792.458 kilometers a second. This is how fast our button pushes are traveling. So we divide the distance traveled, by the speed, and we get how quickly the message gets there. In this case, the information gets there in 0.03528 (and many more none repeating numbers afterward) of a second. So it’s somewhere between three to four hundredths of a second. Sounds fast right?
Let’s examine fighting games for a second. Modern day fighting games (and in a best case scenario futuristic fighting games) run at sixty frames per second. So the lowest input window for a fighting game is 1/60th of a second or 0.01666 (repeating) of a second. Notice something? That’s less than the time it takes information from our futuristic system to send a message from New York to Tokyo. In fact, half as fast (and change) so even under the best, most futuristic circumstances, Daigo and JWong would experience 2-3 frames of lag over the course of their game playing experience.
… and 2-3 frames of lag in a fighting game suuucks!
This, of course, was a futuristic best case scenario. In our current world, information doesn’t travel that fast, and net code does not necessarily limit the distance information has to travel to the distance between two cities. In fact, on our internet, with games programmed the way they are now, information sometimes has to travel twice that distance before a command gets processed. Then, of course, there is the actual processing time it takes for a system to figure out what a button press means, display lag, and all sorts of other microscopic factors that pile up to create a significant delay.
But the point is, it’s unfixable. Right now, coast to coast gameplay is difficult to do without lag, but New York to Tokyo lagless fighting gameplay is actually impossible by the laws of physics themselves! The only thing we can do is work around it. The true solution to this problem actually lies in psychology, not physics or computer science.
No character in any game actually moves as soon as you press a button. Look really closely next time you fire a Hadoken with Ryu. Ryu’s animation starts very slightly after the buttons are depressed, and that’s because there’s a tiny bit of lag involved simply in processing button commands. However, human beings can compensate for that lag, and in doing so, they adjust their timing to near perfection for the game in question.
The best solution we have for getting around the laws of physics is to simply standardize basic offline input lag at say 3 frames. Then, when the game goes online, we remove this standardized lag and let natural online lag produce the latency (adding our own if the connection is “too good”.) Then, everyone will have already adjusted for the 3 frames of lag, and they will get the exact same experience playing offline that they do when they play online from New York to Tokyo.
Of course, I don’t think advertising a game with built in lag will do so hot with the hardcore fighting game crowd. So perhaps all we can do is limit our online play to gamers in our area, or hope for an arcade resurgence because cabinets don’t have latency issues. Other than that, don’t hold your breath guys, because we aren’t going to break the speed of light any time soon.
(A big “thank you” to physicist Mike Keiderling for his help with the math in this article. He will now forever be able to blame his messed up Shoryukens on the speed of light.)
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