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Interview with Neil "Haste" Toronto, author of unlagged.

By WhiteCloud, from http://www.cached.net/?go=main/featurearticle/single/132

What is your age, job, and location?

27, Senior Programmer, Utah.

What’s your favorite thing to do in UFT? My fine taste allows me to realize the joy of shooting frozen bodies into enemies coming up jump pads.

Sneaking into an area the enemy team has set up as a holding pen for your frozen teammates and thawing a couple of them is probably my favorite thing to do - when I can get away with it. It's so rewarding, especially when you're the last player left.

You’ve completed three mods. My question is WTF?!

My day job turns my brain to mush. (Beware business programming!) I needed a challenge.

How confident are you in the lag compensation code? Word on the net was that RTCW’s was buggy.

I can't speak to RtCW's lag compensation code, but I can assure you that Unlagged's is extremely accurate. Most of the time when people gripe about it, it's either

1) they're just not used to it yet; or
2) they're only recognizing Quake 3's natural inconsistencies for the first time.

I've listed nearly every one of Quake 3's inconsistencies here.

When I incorporated Unlagged into Freeze Tag, I added hundreds of lines of code devoted to testing. (A lot of it belongs to lag simulation.) Unlagged checks out perfectly: in normal networking conditions, what the server uses to calculate hitscan weapon hits is *exactly* what you saw when you fired.

Lag compensation: fair? fun? reliable? good for practicing LAN party aim?

Yes, yes, yes, and mostly - if your LAN is running a mod with 50ms lag correction (OSP, CPMA) or Unlagged.

Remember that projectile weapons (locket launcher, etc.) are not lag-compensated. Most people find themselves using hitscan weapons more as they ping higher above 100 or so.

Regarding fair: the Unlagged FAQ I pointed to above addresses that concern.

Why Ultra Freeze Tag? You could have pursued RA3, Painkeep, Head Hunters 3, Urban Terror, or something else.

I love Freeze Tag as a game type, and the author had made the source available. Also, the others would have required me to join a team, and I like to do things on my own.

Initially, all I wanted to do was add lag compensation (because my previous mods had totally spoiled me on it), but then I started to get recognized as The Guy That Was Fixing Freeze Tag. People reported bugs. I felt obliged to fix them. People requested features for competitions and server administration. I thought they were good ideas, so I added them.

Describe freeze tag's teamplay. How's it different from team dm? CTF? (I reserve the right to edit this question if you noob yourself out. )

The object of Freeze Tag is to get everyone on the other team frozen. If you do that, your team gets a point. Get enough points (or run out the clock with the most points), and you win. You freeze enemies by hurting them badly enough - and when they would have died in TDM, they freeze instead.

The biggest obvious difference between Freeze Tag and TDM is that Freeze Tag is a "last man standing" game. In some respects it's a lot like CaptureStrike - except that switching between offense and defense is something that naturally emerges from the gameplay.

One of the main changes players have to make when taking up Freeze Tag is in keeping themselves alive. Getting killed carries a high price: your team is down one man unless they can make up for your mistake. Also, in TDM, it's not always a bad idea to kamikaze attack two enemies, but it almost always *is* a bad idea in Freeze Tag. (If you manage to finish one off before you're taken out, his buddy will thaw him.)

A couple of other interesting emergent gameplay elements are sneaking - I love sneaking - and what I like to call "corpsicle chess".

Ah yes, Ionized spoke fondly of corpsicle chess in his interview.

What UFT features do you think not enough people know about or use?

/ignore is pretty high on the list. I can't tell you how many times I've had to bring it up when someone was complaining about some idiot on a server somewhere.

For server admins, it's probably voteable configs. You can set up whole server configurations for players to vote on. It lets you set your server up once and just leave it. When the people who are scheduled for a game arrive, they can just vote in the competition config.

Bot play is also overlooked. Their thawing logic got an overhaul from the original Freeze Tag, which makes them much better teammates. They also know how to use the grappling hook. Set bot_grapplemonkey to 100, and they'll likely trash you.

UFT 1.2, which borland is working on, has a lot of nifty new features that people will have to learn. Promode skins, server-side demo recording, multiview spectating (with picture-in-picture), per-map configs, autotext, etc., etc., etc.

OSP freeze tag mode vs UFT. Why isn't OSP FT being picked up more than UFT?

It's probably the same reason OSP Promode doesn't get much attention: there's another mod that does that particular game much better.

UFT is slicker. It's because every bit of attention that goes into it goes into the Freeze Tag game type. Little things like the buzzer that sounds when you're the last man standing and the freeze/thaw counters you see on the team overlay and when you point at your teammates go a long way.

And you can't move corpsicles in OSP, and you have absolutely no control of anything when you're frozen. Both were big mistakes for various gameplay and psychological reasons.

Do you think that a reason some mainstream players don't pick up freeze tag is because they have seen so many other mods that lack gameplay or quality? Have so many gimmicky mods and noob mod communities made them wary?

That may be a factor. There are a lot of junk mods out there - but a lot of fun ones as well.

It could just be a matter of time. Freeze Tag has historically been a "for fun" mod, and is only just now receiving the attention of competitive players.

What do you think clans that came from other mods learned from joining the azfl (or LIC season 1)? fs? jumpingmens? gem? cb4? ki? (players from cloud9, magi, cccp, snb, unkn, etc.)

I really couldn't say, because I was mostly out of the loop on that league. I hope that they learned that Freeze Tag can have good, deep strategy, and that it really is possible to play competitively with lag compensation. It certainly makes it easier to choose servers for matches.

Well, lag compensation was such a picky thing for people to accept in LIC1 and AZFL1 that LIC2 will not be using lag compensation in its toughest division.

Netcode adjustments? What's in OSP's? CPMA's? I’m hoping you’ll spend the most time on this question.

Obviously, the largest adjustment is hitscan lag compensation, which is on by default. Basically, the server knows exactly what you saw when you pressed the attack button (it sent you the data, after all), so it can recreate that before doing hit tests. UFT also implements a 50ms lag correction for both hitscan and projectile weapons.

One thing a lot of people don't know about is the changes to how the client reacts to cl_timenudge, and player smoothing.

- cl_timenudge changes: in pretty much every Quake 3 mod (including vanilla), when you use a negative timenudge, other players look a bit jerky when they move. UFT cleans that up by making the client game properly extrapolate other player positions. It makes timenudge a lot more useful: with -25, the client game actually *predicts* where everyone will be 25ms into the future, and with short intervals like that it's very accurate.

- Player smoothing: first, understand that a player only moves on the server when the server receives a command from him. The player's client sends a command every client frame. (So 125 FPS = 125 commands/sec.) If some of those commands arrive late or not at all, the player will "skip". A UFT server responds to this condition by predicting where the player should have gone, up to 100ms. As a result, it's rare to see players skipping around on a UFT server. Also, the server uses this predicted
position for all hit tests. What you see is what you shoot.

CPMA has a bunch of little bandwidth improvements that I don't know the details on. The one thing I know for sure about is its 50ms lag correction, which it shares with OSP.

OSP's 50ms lag correction is different from UFT's. Both use the same sort of technique as is used in full lag compensation, but in different ways. Where UFT is robust enough to always backward reconcile players to 50ms ago - it already had the framework from full lag compensation - OSP only does it to the end of the last server frame.

I won't go into details here, but the main point is that OSP's 50ms lag correction is actually between 0ms and 50ms, depending on when your command to fire arrived on the server. It averages to 25ms for rail shots, which is good - but continuous shots (LG and MG) are trickier. Since every LG shot is 50ms after the last one, you end up with the same amount of lag compensation as you started your attack with. Sometimes that's good (45ms! yay!), and sometimes it's not (5ms...teh sux).

For those people who like it, though, UFT 1.2 has a way for them to use OSP's 50ms lag correction when they're not using full lag compensation, instead of UFT's 50ms lag correction.

How good of a competitive forum is the UFT mod? Does it have well balanced and tested gameplay? Does it allow players as good as fatal1ty to show off their level of skill? Does it lack any match features that OSP or CPMA has?

It's a very good forum. After Unlagged and bug fixes, most of UFT's new features are competition features. The gameplay is at least as balanced as Quake 3 TDM, and it's been very well tested in competitions. As far as fatal1ty goes...I don't know. How much of a team player is he?

The features in CPMA and OSP that you can't find in UFT are mostly bells and whistles. UFT 1.1 has nearly everything, and 1.2 pretty much fills in what's left with things like coaching, multiview spectating, and promode skins.

Do you get a spotlight high from playing frozen teammates being able to spec you? Does it make you play better?

To be honest, I don't think about it much. Sometimes I've gotten a little nervous as the last man standing, knowing that my whole team is watching me, but not often. That's just me, though. I'm sure plenty of people get a buzz from it.

What other fps games have you enjoyed?

I got into FPS games with the original Wolfenstien. Somehow, it scared me to death. DOOM was a riot. I used to stay up all hours of the night with DoomCad making levels to thwart my younger brothers. Honestly, they sucked. I've gotten much better since then.

Besides Quake III, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault has got to be my favorite so far - even though it does suffer from acute Infinite Nazi Syndrome in the last few missions. I think Normandy did it for me: as good as FPSes have gotten, I've never actually felt like I was *right there* like I did when I stormed the beach.

What locals you know or play with?

Nobody, unfortunately. It's probably because I'm not at a university right now, but that will be changing shortly.

What are you working on in the future?

Nothing Quake 3, I'm sorry to say. I'm going back to school to finish my BS in Computer Science, then going on to get a PhD.

One sort-of related thing I've been working on is a fast destructible/constructible terrain engine. Volumetric data rules. Heightmaps are *so* last decade. Dynamic is teh bomb. Static is teh sux.

Is modding rewarding?

Very much so. It's especially fun to watch your mod get used in leagues.

Thanks for doing this for our cached.net readers.

My pleasure.
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