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Will we ever see 'low latency' world-wide gaming in our lifetime?
movros99
Member UncommonPosts: 125
Hello all,
I am approaching 40 years of age and I was recently reflecting on some of the great MMO communities that I've been a part of. I live in the United States and I've had occasion to play with people from every major populated continent. Obviously one of the largest obstacles that limits how people in different parts of the world can interact competitively in the same game server is internet latency.
Do you think that we will ever see a time when gamers across the globe with be able to access a single game server all having a 50ms latency or lower? (I sort of picked this number at random. I think most of us can agree that < 50 ms is a reasonably nice connection speed) Also do you all think that our current technology and cabling is sufficient to achieve such a goal with unlimited funding, or would we need to make another generational leap with data-transferring hardware?
Discuss.
Comments
Well, your post got me thinking about how fast we could make the internet.
The speed of light is 186000 miles per second so that means that every millisecond light travels 186 miles. So if you are 12000 miles from a server the best latency you could have would be around 64 milliseconds. It would probably be longer than that consedering the server overhead.
Exactly there are a lot more factors than just ping when comes to game latency.There is ONLY one possible way that i know of and that would be the developer needs multiple servers all over the world but that would not be one server then,so as far as my knowledge takes me ,probably is never going to be possible.
I like to use the term bandwidth rather than Latency as even your PC system can set you behind others and it is VERY noticeable if you have been playing FPS's for many years.I know in some games you won't notice small variances but in some like i know in UnrealTournament it is incredible how much small differences make.
I might also add that there are really odd entities at work when comes to online gaming,i have seen things that defy logic and even the developers themselves have a tough time explaining it.A perfect example is Jumping,a player might be coded to have a maximum jump of say 200 units,well lag can cause your player to jump twice that which is just weird.I have also gone right through walls because of lag which again with solid walls/meshes that should be impossible.Your monitor speed plays a role,mouse speed a role,there are many factors that can give one player an edge over another.
Your internet bandwidth can get over run by a player with faster speeds and a larger capacity,it can cause anomalies in what gets sent to the game server ,often times leaving information and damage missed.
What has happened by a frustrated community is they have TRIED to create a program that mimics ZERO pings.I personally can't stand that idea because online gaming is suppose to have lag,that is what makes it fun,if i wanted LAN gaming i would do that.I also find the idea is admirable but in reality it does not work good enough,i have noticed or worse game play because of it.I grew up on 56k gaming and it was the most fun i ever had ,now a days with such powerful internet speeds fragging has become instant killing,meaning skills have been lowered to one denominator point and aim over anything else.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
we are already at physically maximum speed afaik
earth's circomference is 40k km, divided by 2 it 20k
speed of light is 300k km/s
20 / 300 = 66ms
So the best case scenario is that a person is 66ms removed from another person on Earth....but the reality is that cables aren't straight, and you have hardware lag.
The fastest interconnect from Europe to the US I can do is 120ms, that's twice the theorethical minimum, that's about the best you will get.
50ms from anywhere in the world would be physically impossible, since light isn't fast enough. The best you can hope for is 66ms, but that would require a straight cable from your house straight to the game server, which isn't the reality.
The best you might hope for is 100ms, maybe 80ms, but not something like 50ms.
It would require a completely new form of Telecommunications than what we currently use. Right now the Speed of Light is the speed limit and can't be overcome with current technology. I do see a future where that won't be the case due to breakthroughs in Quantum Communications but we are a long ways from that currently. It is however theoretically possible to have instantaneous communication over any distance even hundreds or thousands of Light Years using Quantum Entanglement. There are however some problems with Quantum Entanglement that our current level of technology and understanding can't overcome.
So to answer your question ... In our lifetime? Probably not ... Eventually? Most definitely.
Bren
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It's actually considerably worse than that. The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 m/s. (Exactly. That's the definition of a meter.) But the speed of light in anything else is slower. The speed of light in a fiber-optic table is something like 62% of that. That alone means lag of over 100 ms one-way. Double that for round-trip numbers.
And it's also assuming that you follow a geodesic shortest path along the Earth's surface. The map of the big Internet cables doesn't look like that.
There's also some time to switch an optical connection to electrical, process it, figure out where to send it onward, and then convert it back to optical at each hop along the way. It's conceivable that this time could be nearly eliminated. But I wouldn't count on getting something faster than fiber-optic cables.
As long as capitalism is still the overseer of the Internet, nope. Places that have public WiFi access are capable of speeds over 100 Mb/sec free of charge, minus the small amount taken from everyone's taxes for upkeep. How does that compare to the $75 a month you pay Comcast for your 15 Mb/sec service?
So if Internet access is still being provided through private companies asking top dollar for mediocre service, then hopes of ever achieving a <50 ms ping to a server around the world will always be impeded by a person's wallet.