Cryengine3 netcode at high latency environments
Hello Panzar,
having worked with "unified light and shadowing" game engines throughout the past couple of years in my freetime, I always had trouble finding an engine that would follow the "WYSISYG" concept but at the same time remains playable on clients at high latency environments of let's say >= 400 ms. At that kind of latency gameplay on clients would always turn into a jerk-teleporting-lagfest where playmodel-postion/rotation-updates and animation playback won't just be 400 ms delayed but everything turns into one big mess entirely killing the fun for the player.
Now there are engines that can cope with such conditions pretty solid but they aren't necessarily known for their "realtime all the way" concept (for example the UDK and it's UE3).
I have done quite some testing with a WAN latency emulator (in this showcase comparing idtech4 and UE3, but cryengine2 behaves pretty much like idtech4 at those conditions):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDXGazHREvEThe reason why I am going in depth so much with this latency testing is, that I would like my multiplayer games to be able to be enjoyed from all over the world no matter where clients and servers are located, so players with a really high latency should at least be able to have a smooth gameplay experience with players moving, rotating and animating smooth once you take aside their really high delay....
Dedicated Server Coverage Radius at Latencies up to 100 ms
Dedicated Server Coverage Radius at Latencies up to 200 ms
Dedicated Server Coverage Radius at Latencies up to 400 ms
So since I have also worked on Cryengine2 Mod Projects noticing that cryengine2 suffers from similar latency related symptoms (like clients rather teleporting around than moving on random WSAD key inputs) I had this question bugging me since the announcement of Cryengine3...
And since you guys get to work with the new engine day by day, my question basically would be if Cryengine3 in anyway evolved over Cryengine2 considering the netcode and are you from time to time performing such high latency delay tests when doing your regular internal multiplayer gametesting and if so what are your results ?
Thanks a lot in advance for reading and replying to this post