For those interested in how sub tick came to be, here is a short summary of how it happened.
📜 A Brief History
BoatLabs was founded to test and develop a plugin that ultimately keeps track of lap times. The lap times and the system that calculates them could be seen as the most important piece the rest of the server is built around. For a long time I believed it was impossible to get accurate lap times that are more precise than a server tick. However, in hindsight that was never true—I just didn't know any better at the time.
At the end of last year, Shizuya came up with an algorithm for how to calculate your times with millisecond precision. We never got around to testing his implementation, but ultimately he did show me that precise timing was not that far away. Unfortunately, we can't code everything that is brought up immediately, but people like Shizuya do really help to expand our knowledge of Minecraft boat racing and enable us to push new technology and concepts forward given enough time.
🧑💻Development Starting
So a little bit over a month ago, Piggle appeared out of nowhere and told me that he coded an update that in theory can measure times to a millisecond. I had no clue that he was even working on it, but I was immediately on board when he told me. We took some time to test it out. While the logic seemed to be working and it felt like there was good potential, we noticed that it would be a few milliseconds off here and there, as well as sometimes being a perfect tick either faster or slower. But the potential felt real, and this started what would be a one-month-long journey into trying to capture this potential into something we can actually use.
📈 Highs and Lows
After a lot of trial and error, at some point I managed to get perfectly consistent results for over 10 runs in a row. I was very thrilled about it and immediately wanted to show someone how consistent it was. So I got a friend on Discord and started up my stream. I was very confident, but immediately got humbled as the very first run was off. The following 10 runs were all over the place and not very promising at all.
I later figured out that whenever I streamed on Discord, it had a significant impact on the stability of my network upload, and the server then received packets at seemingly random intervals, causing tons of inconsistencies. We worked on trying to fix it, but at one point we almost gave up on making it work on the server at all because of how unpredictable networks are.
We still really wanted sub tick to work and were invested, so Piggle instead started to make a mod that would calculate the times instead. The theory is that the client could ensure consistent times by effectively eliminating any network or server lag.
With that said, I didn't end up giving up on the server calculations, and I kept working on trying to figure out a way to deal with unstable networks. I think it's safe to say that this was a traumatizing month of development, constantly going between high hopes and crushed dreams. But now we know that at least the efforts were not wasted.
📅 Today
And this little story now leads us to today. I now think the server timing is actually very precise, and we’re confident enough in it that we’ve pushed it to our main server—and we have no intention of going back.
While we can never guarantee that it's perfect, we’re at the very least confident that it's much better than our old system. Not just in terms of higher precision numbers, but also in its ability to prevent lagged times. For those who are unaware a lagged time usually has an offset of X ticks. It can be in any direction, so a time that should be 7.220, could show as either 7.170 or 7.270 instead, causing significant differences in the final time.
To really make sure people don't gain an advantage from any lag, we still need our lag detection system to invalidate runs where either the network is shaky or the server is lagging. As mentioned above, we’ll continuously work on optimizing and correcting for network inconsistency, and hopefully we can reduce the frequency of invalidated runs.
Piggle has also put a lot of effort into the BoatLabs Mod, which we hope will become the future solution to ensure accurate time trials without the need to invalidate people’s times when things get suspicious.