Sunlight

'Lag' is one of the most confusing words used in gaming: it's used to describe wildly different problems. This makes communication difficult: when a player is complaining about 'lag', what's his problem exactly? Is he talking about his internet connection, framerate or input delay? So today I'd like to list the different meanings of the word 'lag', both to reduce confusion and to explain why all of them are important. I've grouped them into three main types. It can be difficult to know exactly what's going on, but it would already help a lot to always at least specify which of the rough groups you mean, instead of just saying 'lag'. Note that this post is not specifically about our own games. These problems can happen in most games, although the exact impact depends on how the game was been programmed. Internet and connectivity issues High ping : ping is the time it takes for an internet packet to travel from your computer to another....

While creating levels for Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers 2 our artists often struggled with how to create more depth. All those background elements from one area would slide into view in other parts of the level, limiting how deep the backgrounds could be. For the Starstorm level in Awesomenauts I've added a trick to our editors that solves this problem: scissor rectangles. It's a neat little trick that not only makes Starstorm have backgrounds with much more depth, but also makes rendering them a lot more efficient. So let's have a look: what's the problem exactly, and how do scissor rectangles solve it? In a purely 2D game like Awesomenauts there's no real perspective: backgrounds are just a lot of 2D textures. As the camera moves all those layers move at different speeds to suggest depth. Traditionally in games that's called parallaxing . From a technical perspective that's basically all there is to 'perspective' and 'distance' i...