Networking Needs Fixed Before It's Too Late

Games Other Halo
1

Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST, and Halo Reach all have the same, major issue that has never been addressed for unknown reasons. It’s plagued the players of only certain modes, and I’m starting to get quite tired of it!

What I’m going to be discussing has no relevance to my internet connection, I have a perfectly fine connection, as well as the other people who have complained about this so it’s not a problem with the user, but merely the way networking in Halo has always worked concerning the campaign and firefight.

Delay!

As stated once more delay has plagued only the campaign and firefight portion of the Halo games that have either of them. It’s caused by a simple problem Bungie addressed in one of their weekly updates…

"We actually use different networking models for our cooperative and multiplayer games. Firefight and campaign co-op use what we call a synchronous or lockstep model, and multiplayer/Forge use a distributed model. "

How it works, or how I’m told it works, is that the synchronous model uses the host to send out data to the rest of the players, which involves everything the player is doing, such as movement, button pressing, and so on. This causes a natural and inevitable delay in time of which the player who isn’t the host, and he has to suffer at the expense of Bungie for proclaiming that it’s too much work in short…

"Unfortunately not. There is a lot of work that goes in to making our distributed multiplayer model run as well as it does. "

…The majority rules, while the minority has the rights to complain, this is the natural social dictation in any society that functions remotely, and Halo/Bungie isn’t above it.

My whole reason for this post, is to let 343i, or any other Halo developer to know that this needs to be fixed. I posted this in the Halo 4 section since I know Halo Anniversary is probably plagued with it already, and it’s too late to change close to the release. 343i claims to be about the original Halo, so be about the original Halo players they didn’t play multiplayer online, they played the campaign, and now with the release of online campaign we’re being punished because all the network work is going into a multiplayer that runs beautifully may I add, no complaint here, but it’s not right.

My good friend mentioned that Horde mode from Gears of War 3 doesn’t lag or have a delay, and they both have relatively the same game modes, multiplayer against people and so on. So I think it’s time for an upgrade for Halo, it’s stuck in the past of networking and it needs to come to the future.

2

Gears, tmk, uses the same type of network model that Halo does: Distributed or P2P. They only use the dedicated servers for ranked matches. What they did to make Horde silky smooth does indeed need to be added to future Halo titles. The reason I play Score Attack primarily is because of the input lag in FF.

That said, I did some private matches in Gears with a good chap from across the pond and I can tell you right now. He lagged like a -Yoink!-. When he hosted, everyone else lagged like a -Yoink!-.

3

I agree with this because this absolutly kills me when i want to play firefight or campaign with a friend and then it takes about 2 seconds for anything i want to do to even register and to be frank i want to be able to play these game types without feeling like im being punished for wanting to play with people outside of matchmaking. I dont see why this is overlooked so severly because everyone is to busy complaining about AL or bloom or something equally pointless id rather be able to play other gametypes so i dont sit on one spot so long i notice all that small stuff

4

> Gears, tmk, uses the same type of network model that Halo does: Distributed or P2P. They only use the dedicated servers for ranked matches. What they did to make Horde silky smooth does indeed need to be added to future Halo titles. The reason I play Score Attack primarily is because of the input lag in FF.
>
> That said, I did some private matches in Gears with a good chap from across the pond and I can tell you right now. He lagged like a -Yoink!-. When he hosted, everyone else lagged like a -Yoink!-.

Networking is completely different by the natural decisions of the coder in that sense. It’s entitled as a peer2peer system yes, but it’s not the same, no networking is the same.

You’re going to have latency issues, the delay that’s caused by the framework of what the Network is based around slowly sends back datapackets, it’s sad really.