For those of you who have not read past threads, I am currently developing a third person capture the flag game for a senior project. My task is to write a networking engine from the ground up using sockets and a client server archetecture. Over the past week I have been working on reducing lag to get player movement looking smooth. The basic setup for the game is as follows: -Synchronized Timers on all clients and server that is used to run prediction when a position packet arrives. -All keystate information is sent to the server every 200ms or if there is a keystate change. -The keystate packet arrives to the server along with the clients position and velocity and position is adjusted for travel time. -Every 200ms the server sends client position,velocity and orientation data to clients. -The clients recieve position data and adjust it for travel time based on the synchronized timer. OK now for the problem: ----------------------------- Currently positional lag is looking pretty good. Prediction is reducing the jerks to very small and can be hidden behind the animation, hopefully. The problem at hand is with the orientation of the character. The mouse movement determins what direction the character is facing and consequently what direction moving forward will take him. Now obviously I cannot send a packet to the server every time there is mouse movement so I send orientation whenever I Send keystate information. The problem is that by the time the server gets the packet the client has most likely kept moving the mouse. So when a client moves forward and uses the mouse to change direction, the client gets out of sync with the server. Once a positional packets gets to the client he is snapped over to his position on the server. So essentially I have smooth movement until I start moving the mouse to change my direction. From my experiences with first person shooters that use mouse orientation I have seen it done very smoothly. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to reduce the lag for mouse movements from client to server? Thanks, Daniel Doptis

Orientation can be compressed into a 2 byte form, which can indeed be sent every update cycle. At 20/sec update that''s only 40 bytes/sec upload. I think you can spare that bandwidth

-ddn

Thanks for the helpful advice. I implimented the interpolation this morning and it cleaned up the mouse movement issues nicely. Just one major issue left that im going to create a thread about. Once again thanks to everyone on the forum for helping me through these issues, Im learning so much from this project and the helpful people here.



Thanks,
Daniel Doptis