Movement Prediction

[ADinosaur]

Every time I see a discussion about ping there's always at least one guy saying to turn off movement prediction. How does this solve lag in any way, shape, or form? Sure you get to see where you really are, but you still have lag. I.E. not being able to move. It doesn't truly solve any lag, but instead introduces you to another form of lag. Can someone please explain this to me? It's confuses me how people say that it removes lag.

[Michi01]

11 minutes ago, ADinosaur said:

Every time I see a discussion about ping there's always at least one guy saying to turn off movement prediction. How does this solve lag in any way, shape, or form? Sure you get to see where you really are, but you still have lag. I.E. not being able to move. It doesn't truly solve any lag, but instead introduces you to another form of lag. Can someone please explain this to me? It's confuses me how people say that it removes lag.

Sorry if it sounded like that when I talked about it, that's not what I meant.
Well from my experience, when I'm on a server with high ping and movement prediction is enabled, I sometimes tend to constantly get pulled back to where I was from rubberbanding making me unable to move anywhere and killing me when something is chasing me. When I disable movement prediction everything is normal expect that my character reacts to everything with a small delay. I might be wrong about this but that's how it seems to me.

[DarkXero]

It does not remove lag. Lag is there. There is no lag compensation. What happens is that in most cases, rubberbanding is removed (since without prediction, you see where you are always), so it looks like you suffer lag a lot less.

With 1000 ping, you will be having a horrible experience no matter what.

With prediction enabled, you are going to get hit from a screen away, or you are going in one way, then teleported to one third of the path you saw yourself walking. You will try to chop or mine stuff, but your character will hover the tool like an idiot until the server tells him "yeah, you did it champ, now finish". For everything.

What is good about this? Well, if you are running around, and don't have a completely terrible ping, the game feels smooth as butter. But that illusion falls apart when doing anything else.

Without prediction enabled, you will see your character walk into the enemy and your instant inputs will do absolutely nothing. They will reach the server later, and you will see the answer to the server update even more later. So you need to predict the inputs yourself, and send them in advance. This makes fighting monsters with fast attacks tough to handle. Try fighting a Bearger with 1000 ping. You can put 2-3 hits on him without getting smacked when having 0 ping. Now with 1000 ping? I hope you got a toothtrap field, pigs, tentacles, or enough log suits and healing to withstand the smacks and just dodge the groundpound.

What is good about this? What you see happening, is what is really happening in your game state. Animations and positions don't get delayed or teleported, they happen as they need to happen. But then again, with extremely high ping, you will walk around as if you were teleporting short distances, and sometimes your input won't even reach the server and you may need to click/smash your mouse/keys repeatedly.

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[rezecib]

30 minutes ago, ADinosaur said:

Every time I see a discussion about ping there's always at least one guy saying to turn off movement prediction. How does this solve lag in any way, shape, or form? Sure you get to see where you really are, but you still have lag. I.E. not being able to move. It doesn't truly solve any lag, but instead introduces you to another form of lag. Can someone please explain this to me? It's confuses me how people say that it removes lag.

It does not solve lag. It does, however, make it much easier to play with lag, although you may not like the "feel" of it. By disabling movement prediction, you only see what's happening on the server, so this means you always know exactly where you are. This helps when kiting, when using F and space (because you know that the closest-looking thing to you is actually the closest thing). With movement prediction on, the game "hides" the lag, which means you actually can't easily tell how much delay there is. In effect, this kind of gives enemies dynamic range, because you don't know how far you have to get from them to be out of their range; a change in delay will change their range. With movement prediction off, you can use the same ranges they've always had.

So really it's not about affecting lag itself, it's about getting good information about the lag. Because movement prediction prioritizes the feel of it, it hides information about how much delay there is, when knowing the amount of delay could help you play better. Think about kiting in single-player. You know how long your character takes to do an attack, and you factor that into "how many attacks can I do before I need to move away". With movement prediction on, the amount of time your character takes to do an attack can change, because you might have to move closer on the server. This makes doing everything difficult.

[Schism_989]

Movement Prediction can be mistaken for lag, seeing as someone can hit you from across your screen with, say, a spear. You can't throw them, so something happened. Movement Prediction, that's what happened.