Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-35717121-20180912182131/@comment-35745775-20180912202702

In my understanding each racer is effectively racing alone (at least in the new OMP system). At the end all the individual finishing times are compared and the fastest wins etc.

The apparent feeling that you are racing against others is only ‚apparent‘. Basically the positions of each player are being exchanged over the internet to all other players, however there is no guarantee that this exchange is taking place at the same speed for all players. I guess this will depend on such things as bandwidth of your connection and all other factors which determine the speed of data exchange over the internet (it varies from day to day, minute to minute, second to second, location to location, connection to connection ...)

The lag in the exchange of real postion of Player A and how his/her position is displayed to Player B is what I understand as ‚latency‘. This lag, as said above, is however not a constant, though I am sure there are some algorithms to try to correct the lag, but as with all such algorithms they will not work perfectly 100% of the time.

So, I am no expert, and there is a lot of theorising/ guessing there on my part, but that is roughly how I would understand what is going on in OMP.

The inconsistent lag problem would also explain why in the old OMP you would sometimes suddenly get rammed off the track from an unknown, unseen, or apparently non-existent competitor car.

I would also suggest, that the better your internet connection, the less problems you will have with latency.

If anyone who knows better would like to correct me, please feel free!