[0.16.51] Missing "disable" option for latency hiding

[Windfisch]

Hi,

there are mods (mostly those that set player.walking_state) where the latency hiding does more harm than good (see also). It would be great if there was a option in the game client settings to disable the latency hiding on this client altogether.

Especially in low-latency environments like local networks, the introduced latency is actually much less worse than the jumpyness in conjunction with walking_state.

Please do add that checkbox

Best regards,
Windfisch

[bobingabout]

I'm not sure you can just hide the latency hiding stuff, I'm fairly sure this is part of the bigger picture to let the independent deterministic simulations remain state synchronised.

[Windfisch]

The latency hiding mechanism is usually a purely cosmetic graphical thing: In the cheapest implementation, you just trigger the animations and update the sprite positions based on your local input (but don't touch the simulation state), leading to latency-free walking, but noticeable lag when picking up, mining, doing anything that affects the simulation state. (Shooting )

The more sophisticated (and computationally expensiv) variant can pre-roll the game state based on the assumption that our extrapolation is correct, and revert the state once we discover our assumption has been wrong. But that throws away a lot of UPS just for latency hiding, I suspect this isn't the case here.

[eradicator]

Latency hiding very visibly turns off as soon as you start shooting, or enter a car. Probably on entering trains too just that it's less obvious due to automatic driving.

I'd still prefer a solution that makes writing to walking_state universally feasible instead of some client-based per-player opt-in system. E.g. by autodisabling latency hiding as soon as walking_state is beeing written too. Shooting behavior in latency state demonstrates that the engine is infact very capable of turning hiding on/off instantly.