Remove latency from movement
closed
N
Nya Jules
Disclaimer: I have no idea how hard it would be to implement or if it would be possible to implement it at all.
Description of the problem:
Many residents connect to the SL regions with high latency (100ms+.) This has the consequence that moving in SL feels like walking in glue for many people. If you just tap the "move forward" key, you notice the tiny delay between tapping and actually seeing your avatar moving on the screen.
This is an issue on multiple levels.
1) This impacts the immersion negatively. If your avatar moves delayed, it helps creating a disconnect between you and your avatar.
2) It negatively impacts the potential for any advanced movement related gaming activities inside of SL.
3) It just doesn't feel great in general.
I recognize that there are viewer settings that try to mitigate the latency issue, like "Ping interpolate object positions", but they don't come anywhere close to fixing this.
How are other games handling this?
When I create a World of Warcraft character as EU resident on a north American server, I walk around with zero latency. There is no difference between moving with 20ms latency or with 200ms. You start feeling the latency only when you cast spells since the latency of course is still there, it just doesn't affect movement.
Potential disadvantages:
I can see potential disadvantages of moving with zero latency. Looking at a game like CrystalCraze, you would see yourself touching the crystal but the server will register the collision later than you see it happening. There are possibly more negative effects like this.
How would it benefit the community?
I believe that moving with zero latency would establish the base for the potential of any movement heavy games inside of SL. I see a huge potential for games inside of SL in general, and I know that there is currently a project to enhance scripting. It's just that moving in glue isn't fun and it in my opinion hinders that potential. It would make using SL feel better in general.
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Spidey Linden
closed
Hello, and thank you for your feature request.
Incoming suggestions are reviewed in the order they are received by a team of Lindens with diverse areas of expertise. We consider a number of factors: Is this change possible? Will it increase lag? Will it break existing content? Is it likely that the number of residents using this feature will justify the time to develop it? This wiki page further describes the reasoning we use: Feature Requests
This particular suggestion, unfortunately, cannot be tackled at this time. However, we regularly review previously deferred suggestions when circumstances change or resources become available.
We are grateful for the time you took to submit this feature request. We hope that you are not discouraged from submitting others in the future. Many excellent ideas to improve Second Life come from you, our residents. We can’t do it alone.
Thank you for your continued commitment to Second Life.
Rathgrith027 Resident
The problem with this is sadly Second Life operates on a client-server basis, where your viewer connects to Second Life via your agent - in essence the soul of your avatar, which resides on the simulator that hosts the region you are in.
As a result, you are essentially sending commands to that agent over the internet and then the server tells your viewer what the output of that action upon your agent, along with other users, scripts or objects' actions upon the agent as well. That is why you have that degree of latency - you are essentially 'SSH'ing (remotely accessing a computer) your avatar and sending commands to it, and waiting for the server to respond back before showing what happens.
Moving away from this type of system would be difficult to do as it'd require redeveloping the very core of How SL works, along with breaking various systems that rely on that client-server system.
The alternative option is to have client side prediction that can be corrected by the server. Though that can result in erratic behavior that can result in undesired side effects.
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Nya Jules
Rathgrith027 Resident Thanks for your comment and the explanation, it helps understanding how complex that whole stuff is!
Even if it's gonna be closed as "not possible" I wanted to at least name the problem that exists.