HD Online Play Suggestions
I'm fairly new around here, so I'm sure I'm due my share of... whatever... for what I'm about to post, but here it goes:
The online play is pretty good in it's current form, under the assumption that the connection is damn near latency-free for everyone involved. As soon as you factor in lag, a whole slew of issues arise which ruin the gameplay for players at my level who aren't good enough to deal with the unfairness of them (heh).
Anyway, here's some things I've noticed and some ideas on how to fix them.
1) Calculate weapon effects on the client side.
This in itself is kind of a double edged sword for me. Occasionally I'll fly directly through bombs or trigger bombs that I'm no where near. Missile locks failing, etc. It's annoying.
Just send a weapon-fired packet with the time the weapon was fired, who fired it, their current position/pitch/etc, who they're locked to and the weapon, then let each player's machine figure out the rest.
1b) Remove dropped players from the game entirely. As it is now, their ships can be used as a shield from projectile weapons.
2) Let each client determine whether or not it's flown over an active weapon pad.
As it stands now, we fly over a weapon pad, we send this to the host and the host says "yes" or "no".
This could be fixed by modifying the existing player-position packet with a 'has_weapon' flag and letting each client deactivate the weapon pads when a player without the flag set flies over it. This also means the client can _instantly_ pick up a weapon instead of the half-second delay I'm (we're) used to.
3) Have each client apply physics to the other players.
I don't know if any position prediction is being done already, but I'm 100% sure that the physics are being ignored as I've watched people fly off the track and back onto it (through a wall, no less). This was likely caused by a missed packet or two on my end, but the result was still that a player appeared to be flying through a segment of the level which is inaccessible to others.
I'd think that something like using pure prediction between position packets would be pretty solid, given the nature of the game. That is, send packets consisting entirely of the player's 6-axes and the time the packet was constructed and let each client figure out where that player is and will be until a new update is received. When the prediction puts the player in a different location than what is received, use some kind of super-accelerated-physics (ala Elite AI =P) to get them to the correct location as smoothly as possible.
The problems with this really only occur in high-latency games, in that if several updates aren't received, it could appear that a player is running into a wall when they actually aren't; which in turn could allow me to get a missile-lock on someone I otherwise wouldn't be able to (assuming idea #1 is implemented). Further, if I happened to pass someone who was extremely lagged, then suddenly got a packet stating they were directly in front of me, it would result in them ramming me for a bit (and losing energy) while they saw none of the same. Of course, with some clever AI this effect could be avoided, but whatever.
4) More stats!
While this one is more of a wish than anything, I think it would be a lot more fun to see other stats on the end-game window like speed pads, weapon pads, damage taken (from weapons/walls).
Seeing someone finish 15 seconds behind you could mean they're really bad, but if you also notice they took some 500 points of damage, it'd be a lot more revealing as to what actually happened.
Yeah, that's all I've got. Feel free to suggest more or flame me for being an ass. Whichever.
-C
