It’s always been useful in figuring out if you need to lead or trail a target more in a shooter, but all these modern shooters have taken that bit out of the scoreboard.
Checking out The Finals and for the first few games, I thought it used projectiles for the guns because I hit more often shooting ahead of moving targets, only to find they are indeed hitscan and hit better when actually looking directly at the dude when nobody is lagging.
Yes, the game should account for latency as much as it can, so a conscious decision to lead or trail probably won’t help. It’s more useful for debugging sort of purposes imo, like figuring out if your network is slow or if it’s just the person you’re playing against.
How it helps in knowing to lead or trail comes from knowing how much time delay to add or remove from the target so it actually counts as a hit. If I am low ping and my target is high ping, I’m gonna want to trail the target as they will be slightly behind where I am actually seeing them. If they have low ping and I have high ping, I need to aim a bit ahead of them because they are further along than what I see (though because it uses projectiles, I’d still have to lead a moving target).
It really depends on the kind of hit detection used. In totally client side hit detection, like Battlefield, as long as I can see them I can hit them by having my bullets hit what I see. But if the game is server side detection, like Counter-Strike, knowing everyone’s latency is a huge help.
Counter Strike has pretty cool networking code where the server will rollback the simulation based on your latency, to see if you would’ve hit based on your own interpretation of the world as at your time, so no, even in Counter Strike, you shouldn’t need to lead. That being said, there are limits. It’s not going to work properly if your latency is 1000ms. Also in CS 2 they improved this even more because they do sub tick simulation to be even more precise.
Have you ever actually played the game? Or any online game for that matter? If you have 30 ping and the dude you’re shooting has 150, you’re gonna have to shoot slightly behind what you see. As good as the net code is, there is still a slight difference between what the client sees and what the server sees. The interpolation they use is one of the reasons why you don’t see the other player where they actually are. It tries to guess where they will be to smooth out their motion instead of coming in bursts like an older game such as Quake would be, and it’s never quite perfect because there is literally a delay between what they do and when that information gets to the server, and then back to you. Knowing how much of a delay there is (IE the latency) actually is useful.
Pretty much any game newer than Quake 3 uses what I referred to as unlagged, which is now known as backwards reconciliation or lag compensation. You only need to shoot where you actually see the player to be.
I probably didn’t do a good job of explaining it, but this is exactly what I meant. Cheers.