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Programming IT Technology Entertainment Games

Matrix-Style Bullet Time for Realtime Online Games 59

Posted by Zonk from the leave-it-to-the-finns dept.
gcnaddict writes "Creating a slowdown in time on one end of an online game while maintaining normal speed on another was once one of those impossibilities which should never have happened. However, Finnish researchers have successfully invented a way to replicate a bullet-time-esque scene on one end of a real time multiplayer game without affecting the play speed on the other end(s). Of course, there are some slight issues which may never be resolved, such as when a player may occasionally think they have shot an opponent in a game and is surprised when his target refuses to die..."
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Matrix-Style Bullet Time for Realtime Online Games More

Matrix-Style Bullet Time for Realtime Online Games

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  • Head Hurts (Score:5, Funny)

    by FriedTurkey ( 761642 ) * on Thursday July 21, 2005 @07:24PM (#13130411)
    My brain hurts trying to think of how this works.
  • http://www.specialistsmod.net/ [specialistsmod.net]

    The game has had bullet-time for quite some time, and only effects players in your immediate area. This allows the rest of the game to go along unhampered by your slow-flying bullets.
    • Yes - The Specialists is AWESOME. That's all there is to it. But there isn't a port being done to Source, so my question for the more-knowledgable-than-I /. crowd is this - is there a *similar* game for HL: Source in development? Action Source, maybe?
    • I think the point was that a person in bullet-time can get a five second slow-down advantage (so that he can, say, dodge a bullet) and the person shooting the bullets wont notice the slowdown - theyll just notice that they missed.

  • Oh, really? (Score:5, Funny)

    by pwrtool 45 ( 792547 ) on Thursday July 21, 2005 @07:26PM (#13130432)
    ...such as when a player may occasionally think they have shot an opponent in a game and is surprised when his target refuses to die..."
    This feature comes free with Comcast "Pure Broadband" Internet.
    • So THAT'S how Neo got his powers in the movie. His link to the Matrix was so laggy the agents could never hit him. All the flying and clipping into other people's torsos to pull out bullets. It all makes so much sense now.

  • LAG (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CyberVenom ( 697959 ) on Thursday July 21, 2005 @07:34PM (#13130497)
    just what we need. European-designer-lag. I get enough matrix-style lag already, thatnk-you-very-much. (If this is more than just smooth lag, somebody please explain it to me because I'm obviously missing something important...)

    On a side note, I had wondered if a space-time distortion bubble could be created in a multiplayer game. Sort of a local bubble of temporarily slowed time, which as the effect wears off, hyper-accelerates to catch up to the rest of the game world. The difference from lag there would be that all player within the bubble would experience the same slow time, and a player entering ot exiting the bubble would pass through an area of distorted time as they transition from one timeframe to the other... not sure what sort of paradoxes would have to be sidestepped to make this work right. any astrophysacists want to step in and take it from here?

    hmmm, I think I just described the Tokyo-Jupiter temporal distortion from Ra-Xaphan...
    • The problem with your idea is that time is relative. Ths means that the magical "hyper-accelaration" you spoke of is either:
      a) Pointless
      or:
      b) Impossible

      It is hard to visualise but human players both in AND outside the bubble would see slow motion avatars in the bubble and normal speed avatars outside. Just because your avatar is in slow mo does not mean the person behind the keyboard controlling it is!?

      If you try to do it the other way, you will find it is impossible. The inside the bubble players think t

      • How it could be... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Shazow ( 263582 )
        I think what he meant is this:

        There is a a core point where the temporal distortion occurs. The properties: The closer you go to this point, the slower you can move (animation/response-wise). Let's say a radius of 25 meters or so. People at the very centre of it would move at 1/10th speed. People 23 meters away from the centre would move 9/10th speed. People 26 meters away, and beyond, would move 10/10th speed.
        People inside the distortion would see things the same was as people outside of the distortion.

        T
        • I still maintain that my theory is correct.

          What you seem to be missing that if time slows down for 10 seconds, then what are the "attackers" doing for that 10 seconds outside the bubble??

          Are they contiuing to fire? Are they prevented from doing so? etc.

          You miss the fact that even though the slow-mo player is dodging slow-mo bullets, the attackers are not just waiting there for 10 seconds. (otherwise they are slow-mo'ed also)

          Hence, as I stated, you fall into the two fudges to get around that and they bot
          • No, I understand what you're saying, and I thought I covered it.

            The attackers outside the bubble continue attacking as they normally would. If the attackers want to attack someone inside the bubble, say.. they want to throw a stone at them, as soon as the stone enters the bubble, the stone will slow down. The attacks remain in normal speed as long as they're outside the bubble.

            - shazow
            • So what you end up with is the attackers seeing a slow mo'ed player with their bullets slowing down as they enter the bubble.

              This is ADVANTAGEOUS for the attackers!?

              They now can fill the bubble with 10x the bullets they normally would and the slow moving player will have to deal with them all.

              This does not actually help the player in the bubble.

              The player in the bubble will also not be able to fight back very effectively because they are slow and their bullets will be slow.

              So slow mo in this scenario i
              • No, it's clearly not advantageous to the attackers, that's the point.

                Also, keep in mind that the projectiles would continue in one direction. Whether they fire 1 or 100 (which would take some time, at that), the player would only have to move slightly in order to avoid them.

                Worst case: Make foreign objects slow down more than actual players.

                I don't think it's pointless. It's like sayin that armor is pointless if they're just going to pump you with 100 bullets, you'd die anyways... It will have its effect
                • Not at all.

                  The attack is still moving at normal speed and he can fire bullets in massive radius - certainly NOT all in a straight line.

                  Sure they slow down on entering the bubble, but since the person in the bubble is in slow mo he gets nailed anyway by lead/swarm fire.

                  I think you are visualising "the matrix" when in fact this is NOT what the reality of this concept would be.
                  The person in slow mo is going to be at a disadvantage because the attacker can lace the air with lead while he is still dodging the
                  • But what about if the bullets travel slower than the player? I think that would be an adequate adjustment.

                    But yes, I don't think we'll get this argument resolved until it's put into practice. :-)

                    Soo, off to the drawing boards. :D

                    - shazow
          • What would happen is that the people playing outside the bubble would see everything slow down inside the bubble. Things transitioning from outside to inside would slow down. Things transitioning from inside to outside would appear to speed up.

            Viewers inside the bubble would see everything slow - themselves and everything else as well (including things outside the bubble). From this standpoint, everything transitioning into and out of the bubble would remain at constant speed.

            The only time you'd have an

            • Ok, I think either you are getting the original concept from the article mixed up with this person's suggestion, or you are just incorrect.
              The original article is talking about very small bullet time segments fudged through server lag, the idea suggested by the poster is 10 second segments without any time delays.

              If viewers inside the bubble see things outside the bubble as slow motion then this is ridiculous. Things outside the bubble are still happening at normal speed. So the guy inside is desparately t
              • I would agree that what I described is different than the original article. My point was not to explain the original article or the GP, but to describe a method which would actually acheive the desired effect: a local slowing of game action so the player has more time to react while keeping a consistent space-time frame for all players - even in reality with special and general relativity, if two things collide in one frame they must collide in another frame (though with perhaps different speeds).

                In my ex

                • A poor player is gaining reaction time, but they are still in slow mo. They now have to deal with an attacker that can easily lead fire them because of this and worse, remove any chance of escape. You talk as if dodging in slow mo is somehow "far superior" when the attacker can still move normal speed. Perhaps you are thinking max payne or matrix? Because this is VERY unlike what happens there.
    • Well, I'm not entirely sure what you're requestioning, so I'll point out the two possibilities.

      Possibility is a decentralized lag bubble. Ie, every person communicates with every other player, but through some mechanism (be it natural or artificial) the rate of packets reaching each player is effected. If there is, for example, 30 updates/second, then a lag bubble for one user would mean that those outside the bubble would simply be still sending the 30 updates/second, but the actual update rate is only

  • Player just wont die (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MrBigInThePants ( 624986 ) on Thursday July 21, 2005 @07:35PM (#13130501)
    One of the problems with hiding lag is that players cannot tell when lag has effected a kill.Without actually being able to demo it, I think this technique will just increase this confusion.

    Also, the article mentions that lag commonly varies from 10-60ms (i.e. optimistic estimates) and does not mention whether that effects how much bullet time you can have. I would say it is sensible to suggest that less bullet time is available for 10ms people than for 60ms people.

    If this is so, then how well does the system perform when the lag is varying wildly as it is want to do?? Does the play get a fixed lowest estimate for bullet time, or does the player never know how much they will get??

    Is this one of those system they test in a "lab" with a fake lag generator and so forth? Or did they do real world tests??

    I really hate articles that don't mention the important bits....
    • See, I think you may be wrong here, but you seem from another reply you made to have a better grasp of this than I do.

      If you and I play online in this game, let's call it NeoFrag, and you have a latency of 120 ms and I'm the server with a nice fat zero ping then I have .12 of a second that I'm effectively 'ahead' of you, and I can take advantage of that time difference to appear different to you. I simulate enough lag to meet you at your latency, you see me meeting you, and instead of being ahead of you,

      • Well you are correct as far as I can tell in what YOU say.
        However, how crap would it be if the LPBs that everyone used to complain of in CS are now given yet another boost?? Seems that your

        However, this has little to do with the technique described here which was apparently suppose to be mutual based on the "loose" time that the server introduces to make up for general latency.

        What you are talking about it the lag that the individual has, rather than the "fudge time" that the server introduces to hide the

    • Re:Found the paper (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Cthefuture ( 665326 )
      After reading the paper all I can say is "meh"...

      It is just a system for taking out the lag of a game. Something that most online games already do (especially fast games like Quake/UT). This makes it even more disconnected. Something which does not really work all that well in practice. It might be OK in a MMORPG type game since the pace is usually slow and boring anyway.

      This is something that games like UT and Quake try to balance all the time. The "disconnected" (feels smooth but you often can't hi
  • In MxO all they do is play the animation at half the speed and spin the camera around a bit. Other players see the animation played at full speed. The result is that your character appears to do a fast move and then just stand there for a while before you leave interlock. Seeing as most players just stand there after they leave interlock anyway it really doesn't make any difference to gameplay (except it looks cool). That is, until you get the stuck-in-interlock bug and have to /suicide.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday July 21, 2005 @07:56PM (#13130626)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • MMO flight sims have been using "predictive technology" (=lag balancing) for at least a decade. Physics at that speed means that you can't really pull any surprises on the lag engine; on the other hand, collisions are done on the attacking machine. So you objects in your six view are closer than they appear, that guy who doesn't look like he has a shot probably does, and single-aircraft midair collisions do happen.

      Still, you could introduce a cool-looking "bullet time" effect by playing with the "predictiv
  • Slow-time for me, while the other player sees normal speed? No thanks, I used to play quake on dial-up all the time.

  • Problem (Score:2)

    by Anm ( 18575 )
    While abusing the lag compensation and slowing other's game play is a cool idea, I still see a problem.

    Let's assume it is a Matrix game, and two players are replaying the helicopter landing pad fight scene, one on one. When player A shoots (normal game speed), player B goes into matrix mode to dodge. What animation does player A see of player B, considering player A has slowed their game play to theortetically choose a decision? Player A's computer has to predict what animation to play back (very quickl

    • Re:Problem (Score:2, Insightful)

      by 64nDh1 ( 872430 )
      There's a possible solution to this in how the bullet time feature is implemented: you have your movement keys, and you have your bullet time movement keys.

      That way, you enter bullet time by doing a bullet time move (step left, say) so the other person's computer knows what animation to show, and then just shows where on the map your player is.

      Preventing the use of bullet time as a period to make up your mind would hopefully mean that the computer wouldn't have to make a choice in advance of the other p

      • No, this doesn't solve it. You're still in the mindset of an animation taking the same duration on both computers). If Player B steps left in matrix mode, Player A's machine's animation of the step left finishes (because it is showing the character do impossibly quick reactions) BEFORE Player A's has finished his animation and inputed a new command (release left step key, or pressed another). It still leads to prediction.

        Anm
  • Okay, I can sort of see where they're coming from with how they would implement this, but instead of dealing with the finite amount of lag that exists within the game considered as an online 'system' or entity, why not buffer everything to simulate a lag?

    Would it be theoretically possible to cache the time (bad way of explaining it, but think of it like 'giving access to time to carry out commands which is stored within a timenudge to gain an advantage').

    So you start a deathmatch for example, then say

  • I dunno. I always thought that although bullet time is a neat and helpful game play mechanic, it's not really designed for multiplayer games.

    What you _want_ is to speed up one player's ability to move--reaction time and quickness of response. You can't do the former directly, and the latter is taken care of by mouse/joypad sensitivity. That's what bullet time represents: the activator moving so fast that his opponents literally can't track him with the eye.

    The current method is to slow down everyone
  • Realtime slo-mo dodging would require a distortion in the spacetime continuum which would cause time to slow down for the person who is doing some bullet dodging. This is basically creating lag for players while one of them starts blasting away unaffected by the lag. I'm sure they could make it feel realtime for the person in slow motion, but the other players will not like the amount of lag.

    This is how I envision this version of bullet time: Player 1 is aiming his assault rifle at Player 2. Player 2, with
  • You know, they're right. It's entirely doable, and the matrix offer you all the answers. The characteristics of bullet time are: - the target sees the bullets slow down - the target sees the bullets become tagged with trails for visibility - the target becomes blurred to an outside perspective Once you add in the many-player-copies/motion-blurring effect you help conceal the fact that you're shooting them and they're not taking damage. I don't think lag even has to play a part in this as it's an entirely
    • > At the target end, you'd do just as the article suggests and slow the bullets locally and let the client report to the server if damage was taken. Brilliant! Good thinking there guys!

      Not sure whether the parent meant this sarcastically nor not, but to clarify: it SHOULD be sarcastic!

      Clients are not to be trusted in online situations, ever, no matter what the program. In web apps, you can't believe that the input has not been mangled by a malicious user, and in online games you can't trust that the cl
      • No, it wasn't sarcasm. You're the kind of person who lets tiny, potential problems stop an entire work of art. Securing an entire game open to modding: difficult Securing the damage model on its own: easy Stop crying. Leave your armchair criticism to game developers, because you clearly aren't one.
        • You're kidding, right?

          Have you read the source to Quake, Quake 2 or Unreal Tournament? All of the above do exactly what I'm talking about, because their developers aren't morons. :P

          The server has to know when somebody's firing a bullet, it's not any harder for the server to do the hit detection than it is for the client; why on earth would you let the client tell you whether it's been hit or not?

          The last online game I played that didn't do things this way was Neverwinter Nights. Not the Atari produced on
          • You're kidding, right? Have you played on a VAC-enabled CS server? World of Warcraft? Battlefield 2? Quake fucking 3? ANYTHING released in the last four years? Anti-cheating technology is present in pretty much everything now, and if it isn't the developers can get on board with PunkBuster or CheatingDeath in short order.

            All the games you mentioned were released five years ago, ya tard. Try using current technology to prove your assumptions.

            As for your NWN experiences from back in the bad old days before
            • > All the games you mentioned were released five years ago, ya tard. Try using current technology to prove your assumptions.

              The reason I mentioned Quake, Quake 2 and UT specifically is because the source code is available for them and you could see for yourself.

              But no, it's much easier to flame somebody with no prior knowledge of the subject.

              Also, if you think PunkBuster has ANYTHING to do with developers using client-side hit detection you are completely off your rocker.

              > As for your NWN experien

  • Bullet time (Score:2, Interesting)

    by petrus4 ( 213815 )
    What I think a lot of people don't realise is that the use of bullet time and bullet dodging was itself an implicit demonstration of philosophical questioning, which fit in well with the other thematic material in the Matrix films.

    When Neo dodged bullets during the roof battle scene, although time radically slowed down from his perspective, from Trinity's point of view he was moving as quickly as the Agent had. This was intended to underline the subjectivity theme...that while manipulation of the Matrix's
  • between a program that simulates bullet time with pings abbreviated LPF, and the term of endearment for those with ridiculusly low pings, Low Ping Fuckers?
  • "a player may occasionally think they have shot an opponent in a game and is surprised when his target refuses to die..."

    Well, this is normal. This happens in Counter Strike all the time. You think you just emptied the magazine of your AK-47 to other player's back but after a second you get shot yourself. Then you check the damages you made to him from console only to see that every bullet got lost in bit-heaven :)

  • RE: (Score:1)

    by rupert0 ( 885882 )
    Question is, how many lines of code?

  • Since this thread (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wakejagr ( 781977 ) on Friday July 22, 2005 @02:28AM (#13132870) Journal

    has become "this is my idea of how bullet-time should work," this is my idea of how bullet-time should work:

    Player's are either moving "normally" or "quickly" at all times.

    The bullet-time restriction must be very strict : a difficult to get power-up, or a fairly short total time per level/game (a la 60 seconds per race of extra 50 hp to pass in some open-wheel racing tours)

    All players actually move at the same rate (in m/s, or whatever).

    Any player moving quickly cannot be hit by any aimed/directed attack such as a bullet or knife (this is why bullet-time needs to be very limited). Area/detonation damage still applies.

    Any player moving normally sees a blurred representation of quickly moving players that is delayed from where the quick player actually is. Basically, you can react to where he was a second ago, but because he's "moving faster" than you, you have to lead him. Instead of the computer having to worry about prediction models, you get to! Fun!

    When a player transitions from normal to quick, the player's blurred representation increasingly separates from his actual position until it reaches the maximum delay of 1 second (or whatever seems to work best).

    When a player transitions from quick to normal, the player pops instantly from the blurred/delayed position to the actual position. This makes the choice of when you return to normal time as important as the choice of when you start bullet-time. It also allows the "I've run up to you and gotten past your defences and now I'm going to blow your head off" moment.

    Note that neither transition - in fact no part of bullet-time at all - will necessarily appear different to the player transitioning. All bullet-time does as far as the quickly moving player is concerned is make you dodge all the stuff that's about to kill you (and you don't have to try).

    The main disadvantage is, it doesn't have the "wow, cool, everything's moving slow" effect. Oh, well . . ..

  • Bullet time is, at best, a very cool looking special effect that isn't all that special in terms of gameplay.

    Instead of adding bullet time to these sorts of games, I'd rather see them just take a game with cool moves that's played at a normal pace, such as Gunz Online [gunzonline.com], and add a Replay Mode similar to Gran Turismo's. The actual game is played at normal speed, but when you play the replay, you have a beautifully choreographed video of your exploits that's full of swords sparking, water flying around, and tr
  • From TFA:
    "So far the closest anyone has come to it is by speeding up the player, instead of slowing down the environment, he says. "It's not the effect one wants because the player has even less time to react."
    Captain obvious to the rescue! But seriously, suppose they can speed up a player - now all they need is to slow the environment and speed up anyone not in bullet-time mode. I actually saw in once happen in a TV series, so it must work!
  • Flux capacitor joysticks.

    and I'm patenting it too so pffffft.

  • bullet what? (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Bullet time is created in the film industry with cameras that have a HIGH recording speed. This means a movement that normally may take say 6 frames in stadard film cameras could take 600 frames to complete.

    Something that is invented in bullet time is that the character that "created" the bullet time event is basically just cranking up the frame rate. But since our human brains have a maximum frame rate the play back or viewing of the high frame rate has to be slowed down for us. This is why bullet time
  • so it sounds they've solved the whole thing...except for, um, the hard part...where everyone playing the game is supposed to have a consistent experience despite the difference in 'local time'. can i get paid to do work like this? sheesh.
  • ...on it is that everyone plays the game at a theoretical point in time, which isnt 'game now'. Everyone plays at a point 'game now' + X ms. So the players are actually at 60ms for example. When a player hits the button, X increases because rather than moving forward in time at the same rate ([game ms per realworld ms] = 1), instead every 'game ms' takes for example 2 or 3 'realworld' ms. So, as you hold the 'bullettime' button down youre X number will increase. After you let go of the button, you will be

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