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Some help for some LPers

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Post  dogkealthalas Thu Jun 30, 2011 7:32 pm

Hello one and all, Dog here as a speaker for the youtube channel GamesNowTime. We have been playing a bit to get better for an LP we want to do of this game. We have noticed something though, and that there is some De-sync of what we see to what is actually happening, for instance me watching a friend hitting a wolf that was on the other side of the area. I was wondering if there is anything we can do to fix this, or if this is just the servers. Thank you guys for all your help Very Happy

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Post  Aleron Ives Thu Jun 30, 2011 8:09 pm

After doing a little research, I assume LP means a "Let's Play" game walkthrough in this context. The desync you see between clients is not the fault of the server -- it will happen on any PSO server, because it's due to the way Sega designed PSO. You could minimize it by playing in a LAN environment to reduce network latency, though.

A long explanation follows:

Because Sega designed PSO to work over a dial-up Internet connection, they had to minimize the amount of network traffic used to synchronize the different clients. A modern online game requires a broadband connection, because a great deal of information must be sent every second to keep the game functioning, and dial up doesn't have enough bandwidth to make that possible. To make an online game that worked on dial up, Sega allowed the client to handle almost everything itself.

When you play PSO, pretty much the only thing that is synchronized between clients are the movements and attacks of players. The enemies are not controlled by the server at all, so each player in the team is actually running his own independent "simulation" of what's happening. In a modern online game, this would be a mess and cause a huge amount of desynchronization, but because PSO's enemy AI is so primitive, it works.

All PSO enemies behave in essentially the same way. They appear, move towards the nearest player, and attack that player when they get within range. Because of this simplistic AI, Sega made an assumption:

If the location of each player is the same across all clients, the enemies will do exactly the same thing on each person's screen, because the only thing that influences an enemy's attack patterns is the positions of the players.

As such, PSO doesn't need to do anything to synchronize the enemies between clients, but everyone generally sees the same thing happening anyway. Desynchronization happens when player positions are not the same on all clients, which will happen due to network latency (lag). This can cause PSO's enemy AI to make the same enemy do different things on different people's screens.

For example, a Delsaber will jump across the room and slash somebody if the nearest player is far away from it when it spawns. If the nearest player is close, the Delsaber will simply walk a few steps toward that player and start attacking. If lag causes me to see my teammate next to me, but on his screen he's on the other side of the room, the Delsaber will walk over to him and start attacking on my screen, whereas on his screen, the Delsaber had to jump across the room to reach him. When the lag ends and I see my teammate suddenly appear on the other side of the room, I will see him attacking the wall or empty air, but the Delsaber standing next to me will be taking damage. If my teammate happens to be using a gun instead of a melee weapon, I may even see the bullets from his gun fly backwards and cross the entire room to hit the Delsaber.

If you want to resynchronize the clients, simply have you and your friend run towards each other. Once you're close, the independently controlled Delsabers will follow both of you and end up in approximately the same location on both of your screens, thus restoring the synchronization.

While this may be a little annoying at times, it enables PSO to function on a 33Kbps modem. It is also beneficial, because it means that lag doesn't interfere drastically with the gameplay. In a modern online game where the server synchronizes and controls everything, lag can cause all the enemies to stop working or refuse to die, as well as other strange things. Such problems only occur during boss fights in PSO, because unlike regular enemies, bosses are synchronized between clients. Since bosses have different attack patterns that are often used randomly, the leader's client tells the other clients what the boss is going to do next to make sure the boss does the same thing for everyone. This is why if the leader is laggy, bosses sometimes freeze and don't do anything at all, because the following clients haven't received instructions from the leader to know what the boss should do next.
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Post  hayame Thu Jun 30, 2011 9:11 pm

/offtopic ?

An LP of pso, that sounds rather difficult, for one thing is that pso itself can be confusing with storyline, I never understood it until the 3rd time through, But I have a feeling that if you explain a lot, you could get by with a really good lets play, goodluck! I'll make sure to watch you guys playthrough it (big fan of lets plays/gameplay with commentary) Smile .


Oh yeah, and I wouldn't think the desyncing problem would be that bad if you have patience to cope with it, it wouldn't be as bad to show on an LP, since of course many LPers that I watch always have atleast one single problem within any of their LPs.
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