Abstract

Online video games have grown in popularity, bringing latency as a challenge for game developers. We studied the impact of two latency compensation techniques, time warp and prediction, on player performance, player experience, and system load by developing a networked, top-down shooter with both techniques. We conducted a user study with 32 participants, varying the latency and enabled compensation techniques across 16 game rounds and experiments with up to a hundred AI players. While neither latency compensation technique substantially impacted player performance, prediction made latency less noticeable. Based on our data and time warp's constraints it may not be worth including in a top-down shooter, whereas prediction is more effective as it reduces players' perceptions of latency.

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