Potential Games

ACSPLAN (autonomous client-side progressive latency-avoidance navigation) – \ACKS-plan\ – n – A temporal skew optimization for distributed simulation environments (and online games) providing client-perceived performance improvement in the face of network latency and server processing delay (lag).

MMORPG had a puppet-master model of character navigation. The client would directly manipulate and display the state of a puppet character. In the background, the puppet’s movements were requested of the server. The server maintains and updates the master, which is observed by the client. Thus, in the face of lag, the client has some slack to autonomously move the puppet without direct approval of the server.

In the common case, since both systems use the same character logic, the master would eventually be updated to the state of the puppet. However, circumstances exist (especially during pathfinding) in which the puppet would become out-of-sync with the master copy. Then, it is up to the client to reconcile the difference.

MMORPG’s initial reconciliation logic was very poor, causing wild navigational problems. So, as Knight to Taylor’s sport jacket, I threw it out. In fact, the whole puppet-master model caused several discrepancies. Now, how to get everyone to play on a gigabit switched LAN…