From: jason_watkins@...
Date: 2005-04-17T17:29:35+09:00
Subject: Re: What's beyond Rails?

>>>
Regarding, "and human beings are surprisingly tolerant of latency",
it's hard to express how funny this is in the context of games like
quake.
<<<

Well, don't get me started, but quake's net code has some signifgant
implimentation and algorithmic issues, particularly quake3's prediction
handling. One of the things I took away from the darpa papers I skimmed
is that what humans really sense isn't just the absolute latency, the
variance matters as well. If you give someone a consistant local lag
they stop noticing it quite quickly. But if you factor in prediction to
the control system it starts becoming complicated quickly. Suddenly the
delay factor the brain has to anticpate is changing depending on
several different factors that are outside your awareness.

Someone used to have some java apps up where you could play with this
stuff yourself. It's quite interesting... a similar experience to doing
blind testing of audio equipment... a little uncomfortible when you
have some of your assumptions challanged.