Lag & How It Affects the Gamer

Many people, including me (before the article below) deal with lag the best that they can, and know in general what it is, but beyond that, a technical explanation is out of the question… but if you’d rather have a crystal clear understanding of how it can affect your gaming experience in non-technical terms, you’ll want to read this excellent article by Exuro. Here’s a clipping:

The fact is that EQ has the same problems UO does. Really! =) It does. It just handles them differently. In UO, there is only one thread of execution. This means that the program can only do one thing at a time on the client side. If it is waiting for a packet from the server, it cannot do anything else and thus freezes. In programming terms we call this a blocking call. Somewhere in the code a programmer wrote the call “read()” and the program is blocked from execution until it completes. If the network has PL, everything stops client side. Note that on the server side, nothing stops. That’s why people suddenly POP into view. If the server stopped whenever someone had lag, it would never run at all. Soon as your client catches up, it draws the sprite of the new char.