Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-34843407-20190403142316/@comment-28169398-20190405151455

RandyMc wrote: If all these anomalies are just wifi and latency issues, that means FMs programming is guiding cars through the air, through the grass, and sometimes, through barriers just to regain position. That is pretty much what it means. The game models a four-dimensional environment. If packet corruption gives values that are "weird" it isn't doing a sense check to say the car shouldn't be there.

Also, go take a look at ME7's YouTube feed. We know that the game will render a car flying through the air... in this case by the player's intentional actions... so there is no reason to assume that data corruption shouldn't put another player's car in that space on your device. The player whose car is represented as flying on your device sees their car firmly planted on the road.

As for being on the grass or running through barriers, the game is predicting where other player's cars will be based on the last data input your device receives from the server. If, for example, the player in your race is going to "drift" around a corner, the vector that their car is traveling on just before they execute the turn may predict that they would end up in the grass or a barrier, your client will put the car there. Then, when it gets the next positional information from the server and your opponent has executed the drift, it will have to put the car in that new place, which will look like it is jumping into position.

Latency is a real barrier to online multiplayer racing where representations of opponents are traveling at nearly 100m/s. The problem is made worse as most people are connecting via WiFi which is slower. Even if all players were sitting in the same physical location, there would be latency issues. You could probably build a race room with a very high speed LAN, where all of the clients are physically wired to the same server, but while the latency would be a lot less, there would still be a little bit that could effect the outcome of a race where cars are traveling 100m/s.

About the only laws we can't cheat in life are the laws of physics. The performance of an online race will always be constrained by the physical limitations of the network.