Monday, March 20, 2000

ZeroPing Mod is bad -- 8:35 am CST, Update by The Master

According to Cliff Bleszinski's .plan update, the popular ZeroPing mod for Unreal Tournament is a "bad thing"^tm.

When you press the fire button, a message gets sent to the server to let the server know that you fired. In the case of instant hit weapons like the UT Sniper Rifle, the server does a line trace to see if you hit anyone. This is fair, because the server knows exactly where each player is, and has the most recent information about their position. It can make a fair assessment as to whether you really hit the guy or not.

What ZP does is give that judging responsibility to the client. Using the approximate information the client has predicted, the client checks to see if the guy was lined up with your crosshair and tells the server "yep, you hit him". While this might seem great to the camping bastard firing the sniper rifle, it sucks if you're the guy he's firing at. Because you know full well you hid behind the pillar in time, but because the camper doesn't have the latest information on your position, he thought you were in full view.

I should point out a couple things: This benefits those with REALLY poor connections (the normal method of server-validated hits benefits those with really GOOD connects), and it also benefits those who want to cheat. Heck, if you can control hit messages on the client, you can tell the server you always hit anyone who is anywhere near you. Zbot, anyone?

A.T. Hun comments: Well, this could lead to an aimbot, no doubt. I'm actually rather surprised I haven't heard of one in UT yet. But I don't think CliffyB's arguments hold a whole lot of water, unless you are of the opinion that only LPBs should play your game. I've gotten behind pillars many time (or so I thought) or have been hit in the head with the "mystery rocket from nowhere" (which is my favorite UT phenomenon). I suppose that's the punishment I must suffer for having the gall to live in a town with no high-speed access.

The Master responds: I'd have to say it's really a horse apiece. Yes, it sucks to suffer because your an HPB (and remember-anyone in NE. Wisconsin gets to suffer this-even with my ISP I suffer a 10 hop penalty to any server outside of EZ) but when you get somebody in a game who is running a 650 ping (this happens a lot more than I'd like) and they're kicking butt because they have lag time to aim in, it starts to suck. But these problems don't go away because you're an LPB either. LPBs get that extra 10-100ms over HPBs to think about stuff because they have much lower network latencies. So either way somebody gets the shaft.

News for 03/20/2000

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