@aeva It's one of those "citation needed" things for me, especially when touted on the engine side. Feels gimmicky. Of all the factors that may introduce noticeable latency at millisecond scale—monitor refresh rate, wireless input interference—the game/engine itself usually isn't the primary culprit these days. Especially in 2D games, and even more so in 2D platformers where we have all the old tricks (coyote time, jump buffering, et al.) for improving feel.
@samf You can demonstrate this pretty easily by adding an audio delay to a musical instrument. It gets very difficult to play very quickly. As for game engines, latency is usually a function of framerate and pipelining with threads. In the days where dual core processors become commonplace, it became popular (and still is) to have a render thread that runs over the game thread such that your frame is actually two or more intervals long in terms of latency. That is a lot.
@samf and the difference between a low latency 120 hz screen and a high latency 60 hz screen is really quite significant, and well within the reaction speed of ordinary humans. A friend who has the former was laughing me for having trouble with a normally easy section of metroid zero mission, which I was playing on my 60hz screen with horrendous latency, so I handed him the controller and he had the same problem.
@samf the research behind this is quite sound. Unfortunately the best resource I know of was a talk that I saw at an NDA'd conference held by one of the console vendors, or I would link you to it :/
@aeva Fair enough! I'm not big into most genres that get frame-precise (fighting games, for example) and I've never noticed latency as a player where it was bad enough to disrupt my experience.
Maybe it's just me! I grew up on games like Mega Man with some arguably lousy/ice-skate’y controls, so it's entirely possible that I'm more comfortable with iffy timing? Or at least don't notice it as much, perhaps. I'll take any modern platformer’s latency over MM2.
@samf I think it's easy to accept high latency as being normal because of the switch to LCD screens made it ubiquitous for a decade+ and because the difficulty it introduces into games is invisible in such a way that it just feels like a given game is just like that. Some games are worse off for it than others. For example, most rhythm games include a latency calibration setting, because it makes a tremendous impact on difficulty.
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