sswift: I applaud your patience explaining all this - as well as your thoughtfullness toward user-friendly solutions.
One thing occurs to me that might reduce the artifacts caused by lag. This is to have the clients share tank velocity information as well as tank position, to have each client interpolate the positions of other clients' tanks based on that, and to have the tanks accelerate slowly and have a wide turning circle, so that changes in velocity are sufficiently time-consuming to allow each client to keep up despite moderate lag. So long as all clients agree closely on tank positions, the bullets will take nearly the same paths and cause nearly the same damage, as seen by all clients. Slow acceleration and wide turning seems realistic for tank movement.
I have experience with multi-server games. Although routing problems are occasionally severe, most lag occurs in connections to remote places like some locations in asia and africa. In that case, lag can be horrible, frequently around 5-10 seconds and sometimes measured in minutes! However, if in any single game, your players are all either in North America or Western Europe, or even in South America, then in almost all cases the lag from each player to the server will be about 100-150 ms (one-way) for dialup, 20-30 ms for DSL, and only about 5-10 ms for cable Internet connections.
Good luck with what I expect will be a fine game.
One thing occurs to me that might reduce the artifacts caused by lag. This is to have the clients share tank velocity information as well as tank position, to have each client interpolate the positions of other clients' tanks based on that, and to have the tanks accelerate slowly and have a wide turning circle, so that changes in velocity are sufficiently time-consuming to allow each client to keep up despite moderate lag. So long as all clients agree closely on tank positions, the bullets will take nearly the same paths and cause nearly the same damage, as seen by all clients. Slow acceleration and wide turning seems realistic for tank movement.
I have experience with multi-server games. Although routing problems are occasionally severe, most lag occurs in connections to remote places like some locations in asia and africa. In that case, lag can be horrible, frequently around 5-10 seconds and sometimes measured in minutes! However, if in any single game, your players are all either in North America or Western Europe, or even in South America, then in almost all cases the lag from each player to the server will be about 100-150 ms (one-way) for dialup, 20-30 ms for DSL, and only about 5-10 ms for cable Internet connections.
Good luck with what I expect will be a fine game.