The impact of tick and subtick quantization on hit detection under uncertain network conditions

Abstract

Players from all over the world play the online FPS games, in the games the servers need to rebuild the event when players shoot others, and it is important to synchronize the time of shooting to the server. This result will be affected by the network jitter, packet loss, and the timestamp. Previous research shows that the network delay will affect the player’s behaviors in the games and it also makes the games can not provide a fairness environment, which is an important part for most online games. This thesis compares 2 different rewind models with the simulation experiment. One is tick rate model and the other one is subtick model with finer time accuracy. RQ1 asks how tick rate and subtick rewind differently from each other under realistic network conditions across 32, 64, and 128 Hz servers. RQ2 asks how different timestamp precision, Δt = 4.0 ms, 1.0 ms, and 0.25 ms, affect mismatch rate and rewind position error. According to the results, which show that subtick rewind significantly reduces mismatch at lower tick rates, while it does not have clear effect when tick rate increases.