A hostile drawn with snapshot interpolation hits the locally predicted player from a step away

Fact

Remote entities are usually drawn a fixed delay in the past, interpolated between authoritative snapshots, while your own avatar is predicted locally and drawn now. Contact is decided by the authority on current positions. So at the moment a chasing enemy touches you, it is drawn speed × (interp delay + snapshot age) behind where it is: at 3.4 m/s, a 260 ms delay and 200 ms snapshots, it is still 0.85 m off when the knockback hits — with no network latency at all. The same delay shows the enemy's own reaction to your hit (knockback, recoil) a snapshot interval or more after the impact cue.

Why it matters

Combat reads as unfair or "floaty" — hit from a distance, hits that land on nothing — and it looks like a hitbox or tuning problem. Shrinking hitboxes or raising snapshot rates only nibbles at it; the cause is mixing two time bases in one interaction.

How to apply

• Draw entities that interact with the local player on the local player's time base: extrapolate from the last snapshot's velocity, capped to about a snapshot interval, and zero the velocity in states where the entity stands still. Keep plain interpolation for ambient entities.
• On each new snapshot, store the gap between where it was drawn and the new guess as an offset that decays over ~100–150 ms, instead of jumping.
• Extrapolate horizontally only for hopping/jumping bodies; vertical arcs are too short to guess and overshoot into the ground.
• On a hit event, start the expected reaction locally at once (knockback away from the attacker) until the next snapshot takes over.
• Measure it: log the drawn gap when the contact event arrives; it should be about zero.