> As a player (and a programmer -- but mostly a player), I'm concerned about the articles conclusions about the value of prediction, and the recommendation to avoid position popping by applying smoothing -- to quote the article, "it ruins the virtual reality of the game".

I agree, predicting remote objects causes more problems than it solves. Any remote player input that affects the object causes noticeable position popping when the local client receives the update.

The Source engine has a better solution - instead of trying to predict remote objects, delay rendering by 100ms and interpolate the received updates. This makes the position updates appear smooth without any stuttering. However, now the client lags 100ms behind the server.

The server has to "undo" this lag when the player wants to execute a request (like shooting). It does this by rewinding the world state by 100ms + client ping when executing the request. This makes it so that a client's actions appear to execute without any lag on their view (i.e. they don't have to shoot ahead of their target).

This causes some temporal anomalies, for example, players can shoot you around corners because they see your position 100ms in the past. However, most players seem to prefer this over having to constantly shoot ahead of their targets to compensate for prediction errors.