If you're worried about popping, make sure you drop out-of-order position packets. In my experience, the 33 ms of player input between normal packets is negligible. You get popping in theory, but you can't see it. I haven't seen any for a long time, and the smoothing Descent does is both predictive and minimal. But a position packet arriving 100 ms late . . . that's a pop. When I inherited this code, ships did a lot of jittering; when I eliminated out-of-order packets, it pretty much all went away.
YMMV, of course. Descent ships are slow by FPS standards.
If you're worried about popping, make sure you drop out-of-order position packets. In my experience, the 33 ms of player input between normal packets is negligible. You get popping in theory, but you can't see it. I haven't seen any for a long time, and the smoothing Descent does is both predictive and minimal. But a position packet arriving 100 ms late . . . that's a pop. When I inherited this code, ships did a lot of jittering; when I eliminated out-of-order packets, it pretty much all went away.
YMMV, of course. Descent ships are slow by FPS standards.