Lag Compensation Algorithms and Historical Hitbox Rewind: Advanced Implementation and Real-World Architecture

[Jack Harris]

Alright, straight to the meat of it. I’ve been digging into how competitive shooters handle lag compensation, and I’m trying to figure out the actual architecture behind the scenes. For the ring buffer approach, what latency window are you guys keeping the server-side player states at? I’ve seen values ranging from 100ms up to 250ms, but I’m seeing massive input delay creep when the buffer gets that deep. How do you balance keeping enough history for a valid hit with not turning the game into a slideshow for the shooter on the receiving end?

Second question—when you’re doing the geometric raycast against the rewound hitboxes, are you doing a continuous swept collision query or just sampling the snapshot at the attacker’s reported timestamp? And more importantly, what’s your benchmark methodology for measuring the end-to-end hit registration latency? I keep chasing numbers on my setup but I want to make sure I’m measuring the interpolation delay separately from the actual server-side resolve time.

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