Review: On the Impact of Delay on Real Time multi player Games

Lothar Pantel and Lars C. Wolf, "On the Impact of Delay on Real Time Multiplayer Games," In proceedings of the 12th international workshop on Network and operating systems support for digital audio and video, pp 23-29, 2002

The authors establish the growth of the multiplayer games from a splitted screen on a single computer to playing against humans over the Internet. The impact of delay imposed by the network in a distributed gaming scenario is first qualitatively presented. The delay can lead to a inconsistent presentation of the game state on the computers of the players leading to a confused or unfair results. Such inconsistencies are then studied using an experimental setup. Then the delay is handled by introducing a static location presentation delay. However, location presentation delay can affect the responsiveness of the game and, therefore, the responsiveness of the game at different level of presentation delay is tested using the experience of real players. It is shown that a presentation delay more than 100ms is not appreciated, which implicitly means that a network delay has to be less than 100ms. Introducing a dynamic presentation delay is noted as the improvement to produce better result.