[SOLVED] „endless“ Laser Beams in sim-eth-es

I’m quite close at least the visual part does now attach a not yet very laser light like spatial to the ship and turns/move with the ship. I observed - actually I observed some time ago already but did not pay attention - that transition is very smooth and looks compelling but turns looks a bit jumpy. I could not nail it, but maybe you have an idea why it is a bit jumpy. The laser beam makes it now very visible. How can I make it smooth? Has this to do with the fact that I update the client side rotation only 20 times per sec? Would it mean I have to do some interpolation on the server?
I just wonder how you would solve such an issue, maybe I simply overlook something. Btw. even the sim-eth-es does let the ship turn (not the you are in, but if you look at another players ship) look a bit jumpy.
And sorry to pump it again, as I marked it actually solved and this jumpy problem is maybe worth a new thread… maybe not…

Maybe.

If you are using the BodyPosition stuff then rotation and position should both be interpolated and both be smooth. However, maybe you need to give more bits to the Quaternions that are transmitted. It could be that the quantization is visible at the scales you are using or something.

The 20 times a second thing shouldn’t matter if everything is working right. You are viewing history and those 20 times a second messages should each have about three frames of history data ahead of what you are viewing.

So either you are constantly “topping out” on history (back delay not high enough) or the compression of the Quaternions is removing smoothness that you will need.

Given the number of objects you plan to have, increasing the bit counts should not drastically affect your final bandwidth, I guess.

I think the problem is: I send the current camera rotation and the thrust to the backend. I do this 20 times per second, so on backend side I do no interpolation of that rotation, but actually the thrust is smooth because it accelerates in the symple physics system. But the rotation I send I use 1:1 I do no rotation acceleration, so it stores also in the history the jumpy things it gets from client input (this is not ES this is the key press thing).

So I simply have to do the same for rotation as is done for the position on server, so I send something smooth from server to client (currently I send it from client to server and back via ESC). I hope it makes sense what I’m babbling.

Yeah, I see.

The sim-eth demos were kind of affected by this as well if you were turning the mouse very quickly. Small movements were smooth.

I guess a real space ship would not rotate in real time and would be constrained by physics. :slight_smile:

Edit: because otherwise, no matter what you do, mouse movement is in discrete jumps. You could be sending things at 60 times a second and would still see this issue.

Ah yeah makes now totally sense. So before I can show something I have to fix this as well. It is even much better as I can control on server side how speedy a ship of a given type can turn and maybe can add handicap for overpowered weapons like this laser beam :smiley:

Hahah… the feature that hides a deficiency. I love those. :slight_smile: