| Glitches |
| Ghosts & Lag Ghosts refer to players that are not really there. What I mean are soldiers that show up in the game but actually belong to players that were killed several seconds ago. Ever notice that sometimes you were suddenly killed by someone, but instead of doubling over, and the camera showing a third person death scene, your body kept on running and the camera would circle around it? Well that's exactly what shows up on other people's screens (I think). Ghosts are harmless, but a total pain in the butt because they frustrate attackers. The only obvious sign that you're unloading into a ghost is that ghosts run in a straight path and do nothing else. Lag causes a similar phenomenon, and that's what I call lag invincibility. I think someone explained this to me a while ago, but the basic concept is that your computer is responsible for processing damage inflicted on you by other players. Backing up a bit, information is transmitted through modems T1's and all that via groups of data called packets. When you have a slow connection, sometimes your modem tries to keep up by discarding some of the information coming in, just like you skip questions on a test in order to get to the end of it before time's up. Well, if your modem is THAT crappy, enough so that the information packets that are carrying the information "You got shot in the head by so-and-so" get dropped by your modem, you earn the title of invincible lagger. I have a T1, so don't look at me. But too often I play games when I snipe people three or four times before they die (or don't, depending). These guys aren't ghosts, especially if they're strafing and firing back. Visual Glitches Voxels are weird things. They're the little squares that compose the dirt in DF. I guess Novalogic hasn't ironed out the technology perfectly, so there's the case where you can see a guy but can't kill the freak. The guy's body somehow appears through the pixels, and people begin to try whooping on him. But in reality, the person is safely behind a small mound or the side of a mountain, and he can't even see who's firing, much less fire back. So things are pretty fair that way. Just ignore them when you realize that this is happening, because there's not much you CAN do besides LAW him. There's another worse phenomenon where the guy is sitting on the mountain in full view but your sniper rifle just won't kill him, and you've already tried firing at every single pixel on your screen in his proximity. That's just pure bad luck. You're at a bad angle, not that it's your fault. It is the game's fault I assure you, but these cases are few and far between... just tell one of your buds to take him out. � Copyright 1998 Stanley Lin. Duplication without author's consent is prohibited. |