DogsWithoutWings.com Blog

When did slowdown become lag? I remember before online gaming in games like Gradius on the NES the game would start running slower if there were too many characters on the screen. That was probably cause by the sprite limitation of the machine, but this was considered slowdown.

At the beginning of the internet game era, games which were made for local area networks (LANs) like Warcraft 2, Doom, Descent and Duke Nukem 3D quickly became the addiction of gamers with the use of Kali. Kali emulated the IPX protocol over TCP/IP. This was also done most recently to play Xbox, Gamecube, PS2, and PSP games online.

Why is this relevant? These games were not design for the higher latency of the internet, and a high ping would cause the whole game to slow down. Framerate and movement would slow to a crawl if your ping went over a threshold, and this was highly dependent on the game that was being played.

With programmers being more experienced in writing online games, the relationship between connection lag and framerate seems to have been broken (finally). So connection lag during a game of Counter Strike: Source or even the older Diablo 2 cause the other players/bots/npcs to stop moving, teleport around or move a very odd way. In Battlefield 2, if you start losing packets, the vehicles/players close by continue their current movement until the connection resumes. This seems to be their prediction algorithm, move a until in from position x in direction y at speed z until their next position update.

Unfortunately, a low framerate is still considered lag. So there is actually no way of distinguishing connection lag and framerate issues when the word is used. Why is this important? It's not.