Thursday Night Gaming, Lag, and the Future!

I got together with my regular Thursday night gaming group for some online activities. For the last two weeks, we'd been working on completing a specific set of challenges; this session should let us finish things up.

All players assembled pretty well on schedule, got on the voice channel, and were on our way. We soon found that we were going to have to deal with one of the remaining nemesis of many online, real time activities: lag.

Lag is the result of one or more machines being overburdened and having to prioritize its work. That means that one or more tasks are going to have to wait for the highest priority task to finish. In the context of a game, that can mean that some players are unable to do their things while others go ahead; in a gaming situation, say fighting zombies, the zombies get their punches in while we stand there and get whooped. In our specific case, it was actually the game server that was lagging and our complete scene was having to pause from time to time; nobody had an advantage. It was like someone hit the Pause button for a few seconds from time to time.

As information and entertainment providers deliver content using internet services, I sometimes wonder how they will overcome lag. I have to think that the internet phone services have addressed the issue, at least for the communities they serve. Audio content is pretty low volume; video will be another story, especially high definition video.

I like to follow a few video blogs. They're relatively short presentations but may show come of the early solutions to lag. One thing they do is reduce the amount of data that has to move by using a relatively small screen. Personal video devices have prepared us for small screen viewing; it shouldn't be too much of a shock to our system.

Another thing that helps is local to my machine. My player buffers the content. When I ask my player to display the show, it starts pulling it from the source. If the flow of data into my machine isn't fast enough to keep up with the display, my player waits until it has loaded up, "buffered," a certain amount before it even begins. It then begins playing what it has while more of the show is arriving. It generally doesn't take long and generally eliminates those annoying pauses. I've seen articles that talk about ways to set up your machine to automatically collect content that you've specified so that, when you decide you want to see what's new, it's already been loaded locally.

One of the video blogs I check in on is Rocketboom. The content this Friday is a bit unusual for them in that there's no commentary but I would like to share it with those of you with connections that are fast enough. Click here. If current technology won't let you see the video, there are some still images and more story here.

Looks like lots of folks are fighting the Lag monster in a variety of ways. Our gaming group stuck with it, completed our quest, and called it a good night.