3arch's head dev confirms "lagops"

[amak1]

Saw this tonight from yesterday. Its the first time anyone from 3arch has commented on the lag issue in blops for xbox to my knowledge (aside from saying its in our heads). Sorry on my phone i couldnt cut and paste it but here is the link.... http://www.callofduty.com/board/viewtopic.php?f=73&t=504724&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=10 ... vahn's post is about halfway down the page you have to look for it.

[PhilAshio]

It's funny because there were a couple of preview videos on GT for the map packs and you could see how far apart the hit boxes were from the player model. Either the players at GT gave up or Treyarch requested it but the next round of preview vids for the map packs were all played with bots. I remember there was some official footage early on that clearly displayed the problem except that no one expected it to be what it was and thought that they just added a massive amount of bullet magnetism.

[mist4fun]

Incase their thread gets deleted (which happens a lot in lag related threads) I'll paste it here.

What you see in this thread is indicative of the problem with the game and why we have no black and white solution and thus silver bullet.

A few people in this thread have said "it gets better; and then it gets worse" and others have said "it was laggy; but not so much right now."

This is the one thing. Nothing has changed in the game. The game is generally (apparently) not as latency tolerant as we need it to be. It seems that some combination of things that are not always 100% true, can really make the game not perform well. These are the worse sort of problems a developer can have because he can not "reproducible" the problem and thus doesn't know what precisely he needs to fix.

We have been making strides. As a simple example, every new pack we make we take a hard line at 60FPS regardless of view angle. Etc.

I just don't think it's one thing we can "fix." It's a series of really small things that can happen together. I have an FPS counter on my version of the game and it's running strong a lot of the time.

David 'Vahn' Vonderhaar

[Bizzar1]

Perhaps that is their problem. They are thinking frames per second is perceived as lag when the lag "we" feel is purely connection lag. Nothing to do with how _smooth_ the game plays but more of taking 9 shots at a target with 4 hit markers (on your side) and only 3 shots fire and 1 hit register (to the host).

[Matt]

Maybe one day the game will get dedicated servers, until then...

[amak1]

Agreed it doesnt feel like frame rate to me but some sort of weird packet loss problem... even though there is no packet loss on my connection says pingtest.

BTW... thnx for the cut n' paste job mist.

[Bizzar1]

If I could capture I would do a side by side pc vs console. To me it's not half as bad on pc. But my friends are all on console so I deal with it.

[colb]

Sigh...

The problem with Black Ops lag over COD titles is the same issue a lot of CS players complained about during the 1.3 CAL days. In Counter-Strike, recording a demo during your game would cause minor lag issues (it was eventually patched).

In Black Ops, the problem is multiplied by the number of players in the game. The host players console records the gameplay mechanics for the entire game. This is the only major change that occured between MW2 and Black Ops in terms of the way the game works. It's not a frame rate issue. MW2 didn't have latency issues, aside from your typical "Console multiplayer" lag that occurs on most every game. I highly doubt they went in and changed any net code on the game engine... there was no reason to do so. Either revise the way Theater mode works, give us dedicated servers, or scrap it all together.

[amak1]

Who knows... all i know is about 50% of the games i get in are out of sync. As far as i know theatre just records data... but like i said who knows... bottom line is its way too late to fix now after most ppl have moved on. Cant wait for another decent fps to come out.

[Zen]

Perhaps that is their problem. They are thinking frames per second is perceived as lag when the lag "we" feel is purely connection lag. Nothing to do with how _smooth_ the game plays but more of taking 9 shots at a target with 4 hit markers (on your side) and only 3 shots fire and 1 hit register (to the host).

This is the problem with people using "lag" to describe frame rate drops and net code problems.

[mindworm22]

I don't care what it's called....in the end it makes for a crap gaming experience.  Period. 

[Gabbagod]

I don't care what it's called....in the end it makes for a crap gaming experience.  Period. 

Amen! Video lag, system lag, net lag - at the end of the day it lags horribly. Best games I get now are FFA with a handful of players.

[rtmoose]

Sorry guys... Must suck, on my 25 down/8 up connection I almost always get host (the OPI box is 60 feet from my front door) even if I don't get host I almost always have a great connection.. I can only think of one game in the past 2 weeks where I felt like I was a second behind.. Not even having a chance to pull the trigger etc.

It really comes down to the quality of the hosts connection.... Which wouldn't be an issue if they would give us dedicated servers lol

[toysrme]

demo recordings showing lag is moronic & can not be trusted at all. the simple fact is that demo recordings are a save game state that typically (for quake engine games) is only recorded at a whopping 20 states / second.

anyone trying to pass off demo recordings as any form of lag is simply ignorant.

[PhilAshio]

I don't care what it's called....in the end it makes for a crap gaming experience.  Period. 

Amen! Video lag, system lag, net lag - at the end of the day it lags horribly. Best games I get now are FFA with a handful of players.

Regardless of language there have been so many extensive posts on the problem that him attributing it to frame drops either goes to show that they don't listen to the player base or is an intentional parry of the subject at hand because the alternative is admitting there's a fundamental problem this late in the game would be admission of their own incompetence.