Input Lag: Has it been resolved?

[batyl]

Hey guys! I'm a game developer for the Ouya. I've been playing with my dev kit and each new version of the Ouya interface software since the initial release.

My take: The Ouya interface is getting progressively more and more responsive. I think the current version that pre-orderers will see is actually quite good and Ouya latency UI won't be a distraction at all.

Bluetooth technically does introduce latency (unavoidable) but it appears to be so little with current hardware that I can't perceive it.

Games are another matter. I had to be careful in my game not to introduce too much latency between the code that captures input and the code that ultimately puts the next frame on the screen. It was tricky, but I'm very happy with the results. My game's controls feel completely responsive. Check out "Mosaic" if you're interested.

"The Ball" (built on the Unreal Engine) is a game that I was really excited to see in the initial lineup. Sadly, they didn't take care and their input latency is hideous. I'm measuring 1/2 second or more making the game unplayable. It's a completely solvable problem and it's not the Ouya team's fault. My guess is that they've allowed their renderer buffer too many frames ahead and renderer delays are making the queue of frames heading to the renderer way too long. I hope the devs for "The Ball" step up to the plate and make it better.

My impressions of the Ouya hardware are very good. Treat it nice and it's an incredibly capable system. Do any number of silly things and you'll drop frames, see jitter, and introduce latency. Development, for me, has been pure joy so far. It's fantastic to have a stable hardware platform that I can target and know, with confidence, that players will see the same behavior that I see in testing.

Best,
Brian

[batyl]

"The Ball" (built on the Unreal Engine) is a game that I was really excited to see in the initial lineup. Sadly, they didn't take care and their input latency is hideous. I'm measuring 1/2 second or more making the game unplayable. It's a completely solvable problem and it's not the Ouya team's fault. My guess is that they've allowed their renderer buffer too many frames ahead and renderer delays are making the queue of frames heading to the renderer way too long. I hope the devs for "The Ball" step up to the plate and make it better.

Looks like I need to make some adjustments to this part of my claim. I re-downloaded "The Ball" and it was quite playable for a minute or so. Then, with no correlation that I could see to scene complexity, the input began lagging by 1/2 a second again. It's gone back and forth between 1/2 second latencies and acceptable latencies since then. Possible way to reproduce: If I stop giving it inputs for a few seconds and then start playing again I usually see terrible latency for a while. Not sure what the problem is here... BUT, given that I've never encountered issues like this in "Mosaic", I still don't think it's the Ouya's fault.