I wonder too how is caculated ping cause sunday i was testing multiplayer with a friend, we are 2 streets away from each other (less than 1 km) and both have optic fiber connexion and the same isp, but fs2 gave us a ping of.... 500? i usually have in anygame somthing like 15/20
500 means something is wrong.
A note to Thaeris and JGZinv;
The client only renders hits on ships if shots hit the ships on the client.
If you see a ship or it's shields get hit, on your screen as a client, you missed.
Lag compensation isn't present at all, you see the ships however many fractions of a second after (*discerned via ping) their current position on the host box, if the host box registers you as having fired and you weren't lined up on their computations, you missed, simple as, end of discussion.
Now, from experience;
Anything under 200ms (.2 seconds) is easily playable.
Anything under 500ms (.5 seconds) is 'compensatable for' with a bit of thought and some determination but 200-500 is a bit less enjoyable.
Anything 1-150 can reasonable called 'live'.
Anything under 100 you cannot complain about 'lag' even if you have no prior experience of dealing with it, most brains can't distinguish the difference, even for gamers.
Now, packet loss is something different, if you have that something is wrong on a connection between host and client somewhere in the intarwerbs.
Packet loss has quite random effects on gameplay.. and is insanely hard to compensate for (it's doable up to a point but after about 40% packet loss you're pretty much only ever gonna be able to dodge incoming missiles and not do much else 'cept shoot things that don't move, even then you gotta pray your fire command got to the server...
Anyway, if the current model is to be used at all it simple needs drastically speeding up.
However, several (!) things to consider;
In most online games, you play with locals, or perhaps continental neighbors at worst.
Most games are built with modern architecture in mind, and take full advantage of it.
Most modern games especially, run on dedicated hardware and aren't hosted on your machine.
FreeSpace usually ends up with games where people are regularly playing from several hundred miles distance.
FreeSpace is built with 56kers in mind, being a niche game that was mostly, meant to be hosted by clients, it's netcode is very forgiving for people who do have high latency, while people who expect a host-experience from clients with modern standards in mind, are sorely disappointed because they're looking for the wrong things.
Most FreeSpace games are hosted on a persons computer while it's playing the game itself, any slow downs on that persons computer or in their network directly effects the game.