Quote Originally Posted by =sw=warlord View Post
Out of curiosity, why is it that i never experience lag on Call of Duty:World at war in co-op or zombies but i do in halo 3?
Im guessing zombies dosn't use lockstep but that would seem a little odd to me.
Wtf, they're two totally different games, does it really boggle your mind that much?

With lock-step and deterministic game play, the engine doesn't have to worry about syncing tons of low level data. All it has to do, if anything, is just keep sending out updates on the player's actions and various object states (units, devices). No actual AI specific packets. Pretty good chance Call of Doodoo doesn't go this route in their networked campaign mode.

Halo CE did this same method (Xbox only) for it's multiplayer. It's why you couldn't jump into existing games because the engine had no support for updating a new client to the current state. It just started all clients at the start of the game with the same input (ie, random seed) and just updated each other with player actions (among a few other things) as the game progressed.

Deterministic game play can lift a lot of processing from the networking layer, but if one client starts to fail to update-in-sync with everyone else (ie, dropped packets) then EVERYONE has to slow down in order to keep a game pace which matches an update rate that slacking client can handle. That specific client may recover from this (brief) update issue, but the Halo 3 engine may not decide to play the game at normal speed until it's seen the connection level out (ie, no more dropped packets). If that or any other client repeats the above issue constantly, you'll see it through the entire game obviously since it won't level out.

This is why DSL rapes cable connections in this instances.