How good is the game engine of FFXIV?

[Adrestia]

You’re correct that there are more toll booths. That makes the distance and travel speed even less of a factor, because even more time is spent sitting in routers waiting to actually travel.

I live in Northern Ontario. If the only factor were distance, my theoretical ping to servers in Sacramento would be 26ms. Feel free to double that to 52ms since it’s not like the cabling runs directly from my house to California. In actuality though, my ping is more like 100ms. 48% of my latency is caused by time spent in devices, not time traveling in whatever kind of wires actually exist between here and there.

[kikix12]

You’re correct that there are more toll booths. That makes the distance and travel speed even less of a factor, because even more time is spent sitting in routers waiting to actually travel.

That's the thing. That means that you save all that bonus "PING" when going from cable to fiber (well, not when an individual goes fiber...if the whole network was replaced with fiber). So on that alone, over continents, you're going to see fiber far outclass cable on PING, which is basically what I said.

What changes is the scale. Instead of going down from 400 to 50 PING, it's more likely to go down to 130-150 PING realistically. That's still a great deal of decrease that turns an unplayable game into a potentially playable. When starting with 200 PING, you'd end up bottoming below 100 most likely. That goes from "problematic" to "good".

[Adrestia]

The distances you’re talking about, underseas cable from continent to continent, even terrestrial cabling across North America, are already fiber optic. You may have heard of players using VPNs to reduce ping. They’re not defying the theory of relativity when they do this. They’re just transiting through less busy (by virtue of being semi-private) and less (by virtue of being arms of a single layer 3 network spread over a long physical distance) routers.

Devices like you’re mentioning for signal amplification are largely stateless and take “basically no time” to do their work. There’s no decision tree, it’s just “make it louder.” Routers, firewalls, and to some extent smart switches and the like have real processing time burdens. It’s all a really interesting topic if you want to nerd out about it, and I think it’s great you’re reading up on it. Just try to filter out the noise (typically, what ISPs, content providers, and politicians are telling you as a retail consumer).

To bring it back to game engine design, the question on the mind of a content producer like SE (besides “can we just pay to get on a better carrier?”) is “what can we do with the network available to us?”

The global cooldown and what we know as “animation lock” are soft answers to this: make it irrelevant how fast a player mashes the key. The input buffer at the end of your GCD is a hard answer: accept that lag is a part of network communication and solve it gracefully for the player. All sorts of these things are running in games and are designed to be as invisible to you as possible. There’s motion prediction to have your character continue on the last direction the game received input data for, until a very brief timeout expires or the game hears from your client again that you stopped moving or pivoted. Some games do this client-side (think Ultima Online and rubber-banding. When the client hears back from the server that it didn’t accept your movement, it slaps you on the wrist and sends you backward) and others do it server-side where the server allows a degree of leniency and when your client says “I spent the last 30ms moving north and got 2 steps” the server decides “ok, that’s feasible” and updates its record of your position to seamlessly match the client.