The Influence of Latency on Short- and Long-Range Player Interactions in a Virtual Environment

Abstract

Multiplayer networked games, since the beginning of their history, have been continuously developing and gaining more and more popularity. Best-effort Internet has always been a real challenge for interactive online applications. Compared to earlier dial-up connections, home broadband has really become an improvement in network capacity, which also triggered the growth of the online games industry. However, due to higher latency sensitivity of some modern online multiplayer games, Internet latency can still be considered a bottleneck.

In this work we investigate the influence of latency on short- and long-range player interactions and determine the latency sensitivity of each category. We present findings from related literature and describe the process of the prototype implementation, considering the issues that were missing in related work.

To obtain the results, we perform user studies and evaluate their outcome. Finally, we conclude that short-range player interactions can tolerate considerably lower latency levels than long-range interactions.