How does the ball ping option work?

[Justfrost]

Tried using it on all the options (5-10-15-20) and the only difference I noticed is that on the 20 option whenever I hit the ball it had less gravity.

[carrotstien]

hi JustFrost.
there are 2 tools. Ping compensation, and pingball. Pingball is newer. I'll describe both below:
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What is Pingball?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TufrbFZHoPQ

Pingball creates a second ball along the same flight-path as the first, 'normal' ball. This second ball (Pingball) is delayed by the pingtime between you and the opponent. (The ball is generated upon the opponent's ACK of your paddle-ball collision.) This means that on normal high-latency play, you should notice that the Pingball is always hit by the opponent's paddle correctly, regardless of the latency between the players, whereas the first ball would've played-out the original interaction with the table/environment (thus double bounces/hitting the back wall, etc.)

To configure pingball:
https://discord.com/channels/340715434099605515/404206967691804672/808251292316860457

Pingball in action:
Comparison Video with Pingball On/Off @ 210ms Latency:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEVE8Krob7U&ab_channel=RomanRekhler



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What is Ping Compensation:
currently, ping compensation is a tool which helps alleviate some issue related to latency. The way it works right now is that, when you hit the ball, in multiplayer, the render time rate of your ball slows down based on your ping compensation settings. 20 = 20% slower. This is only visible in your view, and not your opponents. The moment your opponent touches the ball, the render rate of the ball in your vision returns to 1:1. The idea can be seen in the following exaggerated example. Player A hits the ball to player B. Ping is 100ms. Player A sees the ball fly from their paddle, to the place their opponent would eventually hit from, over the course of 500ms. Due to latency, player A will only see player B hit the ball 600ms after player A's hit. The ball, in player A's view, will have gone past player B, and then teleported to the paddle of player B when player A got the signal from player B (that player B hit the ball). This disconnect between where the ball is, and where it then gets launched from bothers some people. If ping compensation in this case is set to 20, then the following would happen. Player A sees the ball's flight to the eventually B collision take 500*1.20 = 600ms. Player B sees the ball take the normal 500ms flight. When player B hits the ball, player A sees the ball reach the racket of player B, and bounce back. So everything would be lined up.

This is not a perfect solution. While it helps line up impact, it hurts the appearance of the ball.