Latency Concealment visually masks latency from the client to the server so as to minimize the perception of unresponsiveness. For example, a game client might show the discharge and recoil of a weapon when the player pulls the trigger, even though the outcome of the shot (e.g., a hit or a miss) has not been registered and recorded by the server. As another example, a vehicle ordered to move by a player may immediately power up its engines, kicking up dust but not actually change positions until the server has verified movement is allowed.
The below figure depicts an example of latency concealment. On the left, at time t0 the player is ready to act to move their avatar, the green circle. At time t1 when the player provides input at the game client, the game responds by providing a visual effect (if this was a car, the engines might rev, kicking up dust), but the avatar does not actually change positions pending approval from the authoritative server. At time t2 , the avatar actually moves since the server approval has arrived. The visual effect in this example conceals the latency from the client to the server by making the move command seem immediately responsive to the player, even though the actual position does not change until at least as long as the client-server latency.
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Shengmei Liu, Xiaokun Xu and Mark Claypool. A Survey and Taxonomy of Latency Compensation Techniques for Network Computer Games, ACM Computing Surveys, Article 243, Volume 54, Issue 11S, DOI https://doi.org/10.1145/3519023, September 9, 2022. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/lag-taxonomy/