About sync in general...

[Guest]

Is sync something that you would improve upon further? Don't get me wrong, I love MTA and I think it's fun as it is, but it would be even better if vehicles wouldn't jerk around so much. I know for sure it's not just me or my connection or my PC specs, since even on everything turned down joining a 3-player server (with low ping), the jerkiness still happens. If you're especially curious, I have an Athlon XP 2400+, Radeon 9800 Pro, and 768 megs of RAM. I have a decent cable internet connection. The game flies in single player at 1024x768, 2xAA, with all settings on highest.

Also, if you're spectating, sometimes the frame rate is very low (capped by connection or data?), but goes back up at other times.

Maybe later you could release a "connection-intensive" version that uses more bandwidth but ends up with better results in terms of accurate sync.

The reason I'm asking at all isn't because of the races as of current, but rather the upcoming DM mode. In DM, if the level of jerkiness is the same as the cars, I think it would be frustrating at times to shoot at someone and have that someone turn out to be in a different place than where he is perceived to be, maybe "jerk out" of position. Sort of like in 0.5, but probably much less (since it IS a completely new and optimized core).

Btw, does the client simply get the position of players from the server and then extrapolates based on current speed, acceleration, direction, etc. or is there a more complex way that you sync it? It looks like that's what it does since small deviations in direction on the part of another player sometimes show up as heavy turns for a brief period of time, only to be corrected a moment later (at which point you've already swerved...).

[erorr404]

If you look at previous MTA versions and even VC-MP, you'll see that car jerkiness is always present, even when foot sync is smooth. You can't judge how foot sync will be based on what the car sync looks like.

They do plan to reduce car jerkiness in the future:

No, theres no interpolation. This is somthing we'd like to add at some point, but GTA does (in effect) interpolate itself as it knows the velocity of vehicles. The issue is that the outcome of collisions is slightly different from client to client, this is somthing that is very hard to sync without moving the collision code server side, which is not really feasable without rewriting gta ourselves.

[Mr.P.C]

I agree with what Random guy is saying. It’s almost like the whole game is somehow slowed down? MTA 0.5 was the same.

And yes the game fly’s for me in single player with all the settings turned up but when im even connected to my own server and playing with 3 people that have pings less than 50 the whole game seems to slow down?

One of the things i noticed with VC-MP over MTA 0.5 was that VC-MP was like single player with everything going at normal speed and the sync was real precise.

I was hoping that MTA SA would have this problem solved but it still happens. Also the counter steering in the cars seems to be harder to control than the single player?

Not that im making any criticism i was wondering if there might be something i was doing wrong?

[erorr404]

Slowed down?

Framerate is limited to 25 fps in MTA, so that gives the game a different effect than when you're playing at 40 or 50 fps. But you say MTA 0.5 was also slowed down (it has no forced frame limiter)? I really don't know what you mean. Random Guy is talking about vehicle jerkiness, and I don't see what that has to do with a 'slow' effect.

[Si|ent]

mta0.5 used some pretty heavy encryption which did stress low end systems considerably. Hitting both framerate and bandwidth. I had a slower cpu, older videocard and dialup at the time and whilst 0.4 was perfectly acceptable, nay a joy to play, 0.5 was unplayable. (incidentally this made 0.5.5 testing pretty difficult as any more than 6 testers including myself meant I would have to drop out.)