Gears of War 2

[MattyD]

Dedicated servers for multiple games with > 6 million users = not going to happen. And imagine the carbon emissions!

[PhilG]

I'm certain the lag encountered on Live is entirely down to individual connections. PC folk tend to be far more clued up on that type of thing and so ensure they've got it setup correctly (and probably tend to have faster lines too).

Given the fact that people run MSN, bittorrent and god knows what else whilst playing on Live, as well as sharing their connection with the rest of their household, you're bound to encounter problems, especially if said people are on low upload speed packages. No-one ever complains about lag when I host, in fact the friends I play with regularly prefer me to host for that reason. I have a mate who's just started playing Gears and he has a 2mbit connection - he frequently jerks across the screen due to the lower upload rate, meanwhile everyone else is as smooth as silk.

I'm sure there are plenty of people on 4 or 8mbit packages that are pushing the bounds of hosting upload requirements, and thats the issue.


Anyhoo, Gears 2...

Looks excellent. A couple of interesting looking new weapons, and the Locust shield are welcome new additions IMO. The outdoor scenes looked very good indeed, and the huge amount happening at once really gave that 'thick of the battle' feel. I'm sure there'll be lots of tweaking going on over the coming months, so I'd say it's far too early to start drawing conclusions or concerns about minor immersion issues.

Most of the time there's so much lead flying in Gears that you barely have time (when playing) to react, let alone analyse the action in detail - the proliferation of online preview media is bound to provoke some detailed analysis, but it certainly seems to have escalated in recent months, especially with the Gametrailers et al "360 vs PS3", "HDMI vs Component", "Pot vs Kettle" vids that get created and poured over. It's easy to lose sight of the good whilst searching for the "bad".

[EvilBoris]

Here's a quick test - next time you play Gears online, select the shotgun, point it at the floor, and shoot. It's a hitscan weapon, so the impact on the floor should be instant. With Live, sometimes it's near enough, other times in the same game it can jump up.

Sorry to nitpick
A hitscan weapon is instant at any distance, something which is impossible in real life. You aren't gonna get a good idea of whether the projectile is moving instantaneously or whether it is moving at the speed of a bullet from pointing it at your feet :P

I don't think those kind of weapons are particuarly common in games nowadays and I highly doubt that the Shotgun in Gears is either.

[Matt]

Boris you're missing the point, I'm not saying to test projectiles for latency as that's pretty much impossible.

The shotgun is hitscan. In Gears, hit detection is entirely server side. So you shoot, and get the shotgun muzzle flash. You then send a shot request to the server, who'll test the shot and then return the hit info to the client. The time between shooting and seeing the impact (in the case of the Gears shotgun, you see impact smoke) is the latency.

And Gears has plenty of hitscan weapons - Lancer, Hammerburst, Sniper, Shotgun, and both Pistols.

Not sure why you're saying they aren't common mate, hitscan dominates games more now than ever - look at COD4 for example.

Would be interesting for people to actually run this test and give feedback.

And again I have to stress, that doing these tests on PCs, with the same players, routers and connections yields superior results, so it can't be an issue with bandwidth UNLESS Live is chewing it up.

[Nembot]

As you say, you must be tired because you're clearly confused over plenty of things. "No lag in the GOW2 video". Well yeah, because it's the single player game, hence no lag!

"Lag" in singleplayer games is actually dropped frames, and Epic wouldn't release a video with 30fps dropping to 20fps every so often - so no "lag" in the video

No mate I`m not confused, just crossed wires I think.

That wasn`t what I meant. I made the point about lag and the game lobby (which you also couldn`t see), I was just being sarcastic as it seemed some critasism was bordering on speculation and seemed ridiculous considering the id was about a minute long and the full game has another 6 months til it`s finished.

I suppose my reaction was down to the fact that I still play my games with the same wide eyed wonderment I did 30 years ago when I was a kid, as opposed to spending the first 3 hours of any new game moaning about fact that the textures don`t appear within the first micro second of the level loading.

[Gerry Helmet]

/quits the Internet

[EvilBoris]

In Gears, hit detection is entirely server side.

Isn't that the main issue then?

[Matt]

Isn't that the main issue then?

No because in most games, at least on the PC, it always has been server side. It stops cheating and ensures an even playing field. If you can remember back on, say, Quake 3, SHOOTING itself was server side - you pressed to shoot, then waited for the confirmation before your weapon fired. Back then, only movement was predictive.

They don't do that now, they have firing client side and hit server side, so the player shoots and gets the immediate muzzle flash and the latency isn't immediately obvious.

Please, just run the test, and see what happens for you. Get a mate in the UK to host, and make sure you get the full Green connection bar in Live so you know it's as good as it's going to get. Do the shotgun test at game start, then wait a minute, and do it again. From my tests there can be a difference. Sometimes I'd estimate - and I can't stress this another, it's not scientific I'm not recording the footage as I lack equipment so I'm going by "feel" - the latency is acceptable; under 50ms, or a frame or two. Then other times, remember same server and same game, it can get to 500ms, or 15 frames.

BTW all my comments on Live and latency have nothing to do with Gears 2, we've gone off on a tangent but I'm trying to relate the issue to Gears to keep it semi-related

[PhilG]

Isn't it possible that Epic optimised the netcode for Gears PC?

[Matt]

I suppose my reaction was down to the fact that I still play my games with the same wide eyed wonderment I did 30 years ago when I was a kid, as opposed to spending the first 3 hours of any new game moaning about fact that the textures don`t appear within the first micro second of the level loading.

I wish I could be that way, I honestly do. But having been a gamer, like you, for 30 years, these things leap out at me. And as I wrote elsewhere, at this stage in the evolution of games, these "little" issues should not be there, imo.

It would be like a film where the actor doesn't start acting for the first frame or two of every scene. Some people probably wouldn't notice, but for others it would be quite jarring.

Alas I'm in the latter category.

I've a feeling I'm voicing my concerns in the wrong forum

[Matt]

Isn't it possible that Epic optimised the netcode for Gears PC?

Possibly. But this is Epic. They already have great netcode from the first Unreal Tournament. I don't get why Gears, with a whopping 8 players, and a very slow game, would present more problems than an Unreal type of game.

See, I don't know who designs the netcode / packets and I think that may be one of the issues. Is it entirely up to the devs to do this? Or are there set protocals and possibly fixed packets they must adhere to as part of the Live framework?

Does anyone here work on Live game development??

[Gerry Helmet]

Not to derail the thread but we do have Actors that dont act for entire movies.

Borlando Bland & Hayden Christensen to name but two.

[Paulos G]

And what about Arnie in Sixth Day? Man that was bad. Anyways Gerry, I thought you quit t'interweb?

So, Gears 2 eh? Looking forward to approaching it with childlike wonder myself.

[PhilG]

+1 for childlike wonderment. Of course no-one should condone children playing Gears.

Not unless you want Anne Diamond on your case.

[EvilBoris]

Speaking of children playing games they shouldn't be, I was in a game of GTA and the entire opposing team must of had the combined age of 42.

I got told to **** off and go suck off Yoshimax's ****! By a 10 year old, who then told me I was a ****** **** and he was ****ing my mother