A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.24.1.0) The focus of this update is to improve the experience of the client player when playing online multiplayer games. This is primarily done by adding a new “Motion Smoothing” option for the client player that uses a combination of interpolation and prediction to generate additional object positions to what is being sent by the server. This makes the client side experience appear much closer to how the game looks for the host/server even when a lower 20hz or 30hz tickrate is used. This has a big advantage of greatly cutting down the bandwidth and send rate needed for a great experience. Also, this can fill in the gaps and account for packet loss to improve the experience for lower quality internet connections. However, the drawback is that there is some additional perceived latency on a moment-to-moment basis. The amount of latency added peaks at about 50ms when a 20hz tickrate is used, but averages at about 20-25ms or so for the same tickrate, and is lower when higher tickrates are used. During testing, this amount of latency wasn’t enough to adversely affect overall enjoyment and playability of the game. However, if a particularly laggy internet connection is being used and latency needs to be reduced as much as possible, the option exists for the client to disable motion smoothing.
Here are the full release notes for this update:
- Added client-side motion smoothing to online multiplayer -Smooths out animations for the client player, even when a low tickrate is used -Allows for much lower bandwidth usage with a similar or better experience as earlier versions -This uses a combination of interpolation and prediction to achieve smoother playback -However, this slightly increases latency (10-50ms depending on the situation)
- Added an option to disable client-side motion smoothing -This eliminates the slightly higher latency of smoothing if this behavior is desired
- Fixed enemies glowing on spawn for the client player in online multiplayer
- Improved robustness of netcode
To make sure you have the latest update, start the game and check the lower left corner of the title screen for “v1.24.1.0” or higher. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated in the forums. Enjoy!
NOTE: Another update will be released in a few days with further improvements to netcode. This discards packets received out of order to fix juttery client behavior that still may occur in this update. More info will be released about this soon!