Halo Infinite Team Presses Resolving Desync/Latency Issues With The Game In New Developer Update

For the current rate Halo Infinite is performing at, it seems to be a mix between players still actively populating the servers and those criticizing the stark lack of content for the game. First coming in strong, it was soon discovered that the number of maps, modes, and weapons is very slim in comparison to competing games and prior releases at launch. Additionally, there is plenty of resolving needed with the free-to-play model for the title as well.

Recently, developer 343 Industries addressed the concerns pinned towards Halo Infinite disclosing changes applied to the game. Already, the firm went on to implement better pricing for in-game items in the Item Shop alongside promising Halo Credits to be earnable in the approaching Season 2 battle pass this spring. But, there is still other problems plaguing the game at a molecular level.

To many, they can notice that while the game is probably the most responsive to any release for the franchise, it is far from perfect. Problems like unregistered shots or melee attacks not doing the job can really shit the outcome of a match. In its latest developer update 343 Industries presses on the matter with extreme precision.

Sandbox Lead Engineer Richard Watson divides the concern into four categories: Being Shot / Shooting Around Corners, Melee and Shot Registration Issues, Missing Collision And Melee Phasing, and Server -> Client Desynchronization. In the first he elaborates on how the server’s latency compensation comes into play and ultimately favors for the shooter rather than the target.

There are multiple ways that you can solve the problem of latency compensation, but in Halo we choose to favor the shooter. Practically, this means that whatever happened on the shooter’s screen the server endeavors to honor. That means whenever a player sees themselves hitting a target, our system does its best to give them the hit on the server. 

“To ensure that the shooter doesn’t need to lead their target, the server rewinds time and places all objects that they might be shooting towards at the position / orientation they were at when the shooter took the shot. This ensures that whatever the shooter saw on their screen happens on the server. The server then resolves the result of the shot and sends that result out to all clients (player’s PC or Xbox).”

Watson continues, “If the shot was a hit, the shooter should see hit ticks on their screen and the target should take damage or die. It will take time for that message to arrive on the shooter’s machine and the target’s machine, resulting in delay on the hit ticks or damage being taken. It’s this delay on damage being taken that leads to cases where you could be shot around a corner.

“If the person shooting you has high latency, then the server will have to rewind time further as it will take longer for the message that the player shot to reach the server. If you have high latency, then it will take longer for the message that you were shot to reach you and you will be a further distance away from where you were shot. If you both have high latency, then the problem becomes even worse.”

Ultimately, Watson concludes that the answer to the problem is to reduce latency with the respected player and the datacenter when in action. “We need to give players games on datacenters that they are closer to decrease latency and improve the online experience. This is something that the Halo Infinite matchmaking system was designed to do, but it hasn’t been performing as well as we’d planned, particularly for players in certain low population regions.”

343 Industries said to already roll out introductory changes for this problem and is said to continue shipping fixes in the coming future. For the second issue regarding unregistered shots/melee attacks, the team aims to directly approach the issue in a later update very soon. “On our side, we have some initial improvements that should be landing in a future update that should both improve determinism and bandwidth usage, and our test teams are constantly looking for scenarios where our determinism systems break.”

This is one of the top priority issues for my team because if you can’t trust your shots or melees to land, your whole Halo experience begins to suffer. We know we still have a few bugs here and are actively working to make sure we fix them as fast as we can.

Again thanks to server latency, Watson transitions to the conversation on player collision & phasing. While the machine tries to predetermine how players react with certain instances, the overall outcome shows to be going against the player’s intentions. “In some shooters this may be acceptable as close quarters combat may not be that frequent, but in Halo the melee dance is an important part of our combat, so we have systems that attempt to deal with these edge cases by performing similar latency compensation to what happens when a shot is taken.

“The melee lunge is a particularly challenging case, as you have two players moving towards locations that are actually where the player they are targeting was in the past. Imagine two players strafing in opposite directions to each other. In the images below, imagine the purple player has been strafing to the right and the green player has been strafing to the left.

What appears to be the least impactful issue is desynchronization: elements of gameplay when facing this problem typically gets cleaned up when detected. However, once rubberbanding is apparent in action illustrates that the backend failed to detect desync and that is where 343 Industries plans to tackle the situation head on in new builds for the game.

Are you surprised with 343 Industries transparency to resolve Halo Infinite’s most technical problems?

Halo Infinite is out now for Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Source: Halo Waypoint