We're excited to have the patch going up tonight - crossing fingers that the netcode improvements address many of the shortfalls in the previous version. While waiting for it to go live, I thought I'd share the last bit of info regarding tweaks to the ‘rollback' system.
As a reminder from previous posts: The HD Remix latency hiding solution works by allowing players to input moves immediately and deal with network mismatches later. When conflicts occur, the game is rewound to the last known good state and then corrected moves are played back until the game is re-synchronized.
In an ideal situation, this process of rewinding and catching up to the correct state would happen as quickly as possible. The longer it takes, the more likely players are to notice a timing difference. There is already an inherent visual flaw in the system as moves that were incorrectly issued have to be canceled and rolled back (appears a momentary ‘glitch'). Our goal is to at least try to finish corrected moves at the appropriate time.
Rather than play entire moves back during the correction phase, we actually attempt to recover faster by skipping frames of animation and blending between them. The first Beta release had an early version of this method that didn't account well for the relative length of time between frames. For example, if a character performed a jump and too many frames were skipped in the middle of the animation, the player would appear to be warping in air.
After some experimentation, Backbone arrived at a better mix of original and blended frames to smooth this out. There is still some tweaking to be done on this, but the algorithm appears much improved. One thing to note is that this is purely a cosmetic fix to the renderer - it does not actually involve a change to the network layer.
If you would like to see the difference between the old and new smoothing, follow Rey's advice on the Beta Patch announcement:
"Hold the Left Trigger, Right Trigger, RB, LB and while holding down the buttons, hit start. You should hear an audible tone."
- Gary
