Would you rather lead somebody or deal with being killed by people you can't see as having the ability to do so?
Over what we have now? Hell yes, I would unquestionably take "dying behind cover", as that phenomenon is commonly called. The reasons are straight-forward:
- It's just an artifact of the time delay, and it's trivial to deal with. It's easy to remember where I was 200ms ago. It's not so easy to predict where a target is going to be 200ms in the future. In fact, unless they're running in a straight line, it's pretty random. Even the straight lines can be a pain in the *** at times.
- We can already "die behind cover" under the current model. While I was recording footage last night, I caught it several times. I could put some on youtube if you'd like to see solid examples. We wouldn't be getting anything new.
- It's a fairly rare event. People don't move very quickly in RO2, and with the sighting delay, aimed snapshot fire is nonexistent. It's pretty rare to gain or lose LOS on someone in just 200ms, and it takes a miracle to flick-shoot someone in that time.
- But you know what's not a rare event? Shooting at a target that's doing something other than standing perfectly still. Making that work is just a little higher priority.
Well then if the unreal net-code is perfect for fast moving entities over multiplayer, then why the hell are we seeing so many problems with RO2?
Because RO2 is using it for something it wasn't made for. Unreal's basic system is fine and dandy for a game based on short-range combat with brute force weapons. When your staples are rocket launcher splash damage, miniguns, and screen-filling flak cannons, you don't really care how well it holds up to pinpoint precision. When they changed the game design, they should have changed the network design too. In RO1, it was somewhat excusable to stick with the default, because they were a struggling development team just trying to get something out the door, and, as others have described, the action was slow-paced enough that it wasn't quite as game-wrecking.
But this is RO2, and it's well past time to get around to fixing this.
I'm sorry, but the moment you mention client side hit detection you frankly have no place talking to anyone about hit detection. Seriously, think about it for a second. Especially with regard to security...
Client side hit detection is not a dirty word, even in regards to security. RO2 runs both VAC and Punkbuster, either of which is entirely capable on its own of detecting a modified client process. We can be as assured that the client is reliable as we ever can be in PC gaming. A potential man-in-the-middle approach is always theoretically possible, just as it is now and always has been, but it has the same problems it always has, of being a huge technical undertaking to produce a cheat that's even more visible to spectator & demo verification than an aimbot is. In short, the same methods that have always deterred cheating will continue to do so.
Client-side hit detection has the twin advantages of being extremely easy to implement and also taking the substantial hit detection load off the server, distributing it among the clients. The latter is almost enough of a reason by itself, given how stressed RO2 servers tend to be.
This thread highlights one of the many reasons why I haven't touched RO2 for quite some time.
The bullet lag really is terrible. It's basically the main reason my friends and I quit playing.
My friend has quit for this reason too. At times, I'm almost there also. It would be a shame, because hidden behind the garbage networking is a game that I would clearly quite enjoy for a long time....and seeing a good product wrecked by poor programming offends me on a professional level
