ACidMaN
2012-05-05, 09:13
In Battlefield 3 you'll see (since a patch in December) a slider called Network Smoothing in your multi-player game settings. This slider changes the equivalent of LERP on the frostbite 2 engine. It has been speculated (never said by dice), and I agree, that the slider scale is most likely a 0 ms buffer (left) to a 100 ms buffer (right).
Let me recap this quickly. Interpolation is on... This means your game will not display a packet update until it has another update to draw a fluid movement with interpreted frames in between (interpret = interpolation). If interpolation were off, your game would update player movements (on your screen) as they are received from the server, and everyone would skip around the screen, but you would see people come around corners faster (50 ms ahead of time). LERP being the additional time buffer for interpolation can be optimized for your network settings and preferences. By default we said your game allows 100 ms for network variations (this is in addition to the 50 ms between packet updates which can’t be removed with interpolation on). If you move your Network Slider to the left (or type cl_interp 0, cl_interp_ratio 0 in your console for TF2, CSS, or DODS) you will remove the buffer by setting it to 0. This means you now see things 100ms sooner than you did previously (assuming your slider was all the way to the right which is default).
I play with my slider all the way to the left, and never change it. As a competitive player I’m willing ditch the LERP buffer, and sacrifice a little bit of smoothness, to see people come around corners milliseconds faster. You may find you like to keep your slider at 25% to maintain smoothness. Ultimately, as I said before, it is up to personal preference and a persons network restrictions. Try it to the left and see if you can get used to it, it won’t seem perfectly smooth because the Internet and servers are a bit finicky. The higher your ping the greater likely hood of network variations, so you may need to move the slider more to the right.
One word of warning, in Battlefield 3 the knife and ladder climb animations will appear extremely jittery with the network slider to the left, but that won’t effect game-play.
http://www.adkgamers.com/index.html/_/comp-team-articles/optimization-maximization-intensification-pa-r221#
Let me recap this quickly. Interpolation is on... This means your game will not display a packet update until it has another update to draw a fluid movement with interpreted frames in between (interpret = interpolation). If interpolation were off, your game would update player movements (on your screen) as they are received from the server, and everyone would skip around the screen, but you would see people come around corners faster (50 ms ahead of time). LERP being the additional time buffer for interpolation can be optimized for your network settings and preferences. By default we said your game allows 100 ms for network variations (this is in addition to the 50 ms between packet updates which can’t be removed with interpolation on). If you move your Network Slider to the left (or type cl_interp 0, cl_interp_ratio 0 in your console for TF2, CSS, or DODS) you will remove the buffer by setting it to 0. This means you now see things 100ms sooner than you did previously (assuming your slider was all the way to the right which is default).
I play with my slider all the way to the left, and never change it. As a competitive player I’m willing ditch the LERP buffer, and sacrifice a little bit of smoothness, to see people come around corners milliseconds faster. You may find you like to keep your slider at 25% to maintain smoothness. Ultimately, as I said before, it is up to personal preference and a persons network restrictions. Try it to the left and see if you can get used to it, it won’t seem perfectly smooth because the Internet and servers are a bit finicky. The higher your ping the greater likely hood of network variations, so you may need to move the slider more to the right.
One word of warning, in Battlefield 3 the knife and ladder climb animations will appear extremely jittery with the network slider to the left, but that won’t effect game-play.
http://www.adkgamers.com/index.html/_/comp-team-articles/optimization-maximization-intensification-pa-r221#