Wishlist for new UI enhancements after announcements

[Packetdancer]

While you can't solve it entirely, the amount of delay is definitely way more than most online games I have experience with, or at least these specific issues have never been this pronounced.
It's just another thing on the pile, really.

It's less that there's more inherent delay (though there does seem to be some truth to that) and more that FFXIV's handling of replicated state where movement is concerned is... uh. How to put this.

Okay, without going into theories behind how you handle network replication of movement in online gaming, the non-technical analogy here would be that, so far as I can tell, that FFXIV puts less importance on where you're going as opposed to where you've been.

That might sound like a really subtle difference, but it is not.

Prediction of where you're headed based on existing movement -- and moving your character ahead-of-time in the server representation and on other remote clients -- is very key to the illusion that there's no major perceivable network delay in a lot of online gaming. Many games are deciding where you probably are before you actually tell them you're there, and then adjusting your movement to correct your position if they're wrong. This means your friend in some game might seem to be moving smoothly with no latency or lag, but in actuality the movements you see might be slightly different than what your friend is actually doing, with the game adjusting what you see as their movement somewhat on-the-fly to correct their movement and bring it in alignment with where they actually are.

Now, handling movement prediction is a pain, no question; I've been working on a game in my spare time with a free-running/parkour system, and let me tell you, handling that in multiplayer with solid network prediction has been an adventure. And not always the good kind.

But FFXIV's movement model is a lot simpler, and there definitely are some improvements they could make... though they would probably not be trivial to implement at this point.

Edit: Holy flipping heck, Shougun. And I thought I could write long posts... that one a few pages ago is one for the record books!