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[Blink]

Alright, so first: I know online is inherently slow. You can't do twitchy gameplay, no split second competitions, etc. But can gameplay for online games feel fast even if it isn't?

Rapid rounds, quick turnarounds, high stakes - these are the things that make Towerfall and Super Hexagon feel ridiculously fast and very fun to me. It's a feeling I don't get in 15min matches of TF2 where there's lots of walking and only a few seconds of that split second action once you finally get to the fight. Melee felt fast, Brawl was floaty - most likely due to online, but they say Smash Wii U is faster feeling. But is that enough? Much of Brawl too was getting to the fight, much of Melee was quick dodges inside of it.

I want to play an online VS game where most of your time is spent in the fight, the fight happens fast, and the results are high. Does this exist? Most online games seem to be a lot of waiting or time spent moving.

[s0]

You can't do twitchy gameplay, no split second competitions, etc.

are you sure about that? because i had a lot of fun with quake 3 way back when

[valrus]

Alright, so first: I know online is inherently slow. You can't do twitchy gameplay, no split second competitions, etc. But can gameplay for online games feel fast even if it isn't?

W.r.t. allowing fast player movement but still doing online PvP, I think there are a lot of possibilities like the FPS aiming trick, where you are, from one player's point of view, "lying" about what happened, but because of what they can know about the game state, they're not in a position to realize you're lying.

For example, if player interaction consists of trying to shoot each other, some possibilities might be:

• Have lots of splash damage.  It's easy to say "That didn't hit me" but harder to say "I wasn't within the damage radius".
• In a similar trick to the FPS trick, make it so a player cannot reliably see opponent attacks.  For example, have weapons like lasers or sonic weapons which have only indirect visibility.  Maybe act as if the player's HUD is drawing visual representations for convenience, so that you can see your own laser but your opponents' lasers are not represented, or represented only as hypotheses.
• Make damage probabilistic (like in an RPG), and in calculating hits always use the victim's POV.  When the attack doesn't hit (from the POV of the victim), give the shooter a "miss" (no matter if they saw it hit).  The attacker can't know you're "lying", however, because they don't know for any given miss whether it's a lag-miss or a successful "evade" roll on the part of the victim.
• All attacks are portrayed as if they're homing missiles; if the game calculates a hit, all players see the missile curving towards wherever they think the victim currently is.  Would be silly for archer duels but fine for wizard duels.

[dspencer]

Melee felt fast, Brawl was floaty - most likely due to online, but they say Smash Wii U is faster feeling. But is that enough? Much of Brawl too was getting to the fight, much of Melee was quick dodges inside of it.

This is a faulty premise. brawl was slowed down to make the game more accessible. Project M (projectmgame.com) uses the brawl engine, but is fast (not quite as fast as melee, but much closer to it than brawl's speed) and can be played online.

To answer your question... no, it doesn't have to be.

[Blink]

Alright, so first: I know online is inherently slow. You can't do twitchy gameplay, no split second competitions, etc. But can gameplay for online games feel fast even if it isn't?

W.r.t. allowing fast player movement but still doing online PvP, I think there are a lot of possibilities like the FPS aiming trick, where you are, from one player's point of view, "lying" about what happened, but because of what they can know about the game state, they're not in a position to realize you're lying.

For example, if player interaction consists of trying to shoot each other, some possibilities might be:

• Have lots of splash damage.  It's easy to say "That didn't hit me" but harder to say "I wasn't within the damage radius".
• In a similar trick to the FPS trick, make it so a player cannot reliably see opponent attacks.  For example, have weapons like lasers or sonic weapons which have only indirect visibility.  Maybe act as if the player's HUD is drawing visual representations for convenience, so that you can see your own laser but your opponents' lasers are not represented, or represented only as hypotheses.
• Make damage probabilistic (like in an RPG), and in calculating hits always use the victim's POV.  When the attack doesn't hit (from the POV of the victim), give the shooter a "miss" (no matter if they saw it hit).  The attacker can't know you're "lying", however, because they don't know for any given miss whether it's a lag-miss or a successful "evade" roll on the part of the victim.
• All attacks are portrayed as if they're homing missiles; if the game calculates a hit, all players see the missile curving towards wherever they think the victim currently is.  Would be silly for archer duels but fine for wizard duels.

This is much more of what I'm concerned about. Donkey Kong and Pac-man feel great because they're accurate down to the pixel and the millisecond. That's really tight gameplay, very twitchy imo because the last second move can still save you.

C.A. Silbereisen: I have not played Quake 3 yet, I know it does online with relatively fast movement and twitchy aiming as a series, but can you really do a last second dodge? I feel like it's most likely going to be the same as what valrus is describing here, half truths and wider ranges.

dspencer: I'll have to look into that! Project M gets high praise, it's just a bit harder to get to.

[Schoq]

just play a fps at low ping, this has been possible since doom, jesus

[s0]

i don't actually know anything about quake 3's netcode so i have no idea, sorry. idk, maybe online is suboptimal for "serious competitive play" or watever but it doesn't mean it can't still be fun just hopping on a server and playing a few rounds (which is never going to be "seriously competitive" anyway)

i don't agree with the original article's point that because it can't be done "perfectly", it shouldn't be done. i mean i understand why the games mentioned don't have online (indies have to set priorities), but i dont think there is anything fundamentally bad about having and online option for more "casual" play and still having local mp/LAN for competitive play. those things are not mutually exclusive.

[baconman]

I think the main thing is, you have to anticipate some interference in online play, and the pacing of the games should be deliberate/slow enough to compensate for that. This said, there's plenty of games that are fast and play online; but when that interference or packet loss happens, the effects of that on gameplay are far more significant.

There's a good reason my Street Fighter IV didn't start off playing at 3rd Strike's speed, and why it's still nowhere near SFA3's. Ultimate Marvel 3 plays *really fast* for an online game though, and so does MvC 2. You can also reduce inherent complexity of the game in question, so that the game can get away with "communicating less data" to some effect.