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Show HN: Hacker League – Open-Source Rocket League on Linux

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Re: Show HN: Hacker League – Open-Source Rocket League on Linux

#51

Post by JasonSage »

fwip wrote: post #36
JasonSage wrote: post #19

I seriously, seriously think that in the future (possibly far future) various eSports will all be derived from a few open-source base games. The ability of game developers to leverage licensing, contracts with orgs, etc. to lock down a competitive ecosystem with exclusivity results in inability for a "free market" to develop around running events and broadcasts. Rocket League and League of Legends come to mind here,…

I don't think "open-source" means much of anything here. You can freely copy game design and make your own knockoffs. That's why half of the video gaming market is Doom-derived. Anybody can make a football league, and anyone can make a MOBA. But to make the next League of Legends or the NFL, you need a ton of marketing money, and you need to pay to attract the top player talent. The actual money you pay the developer…

Open source means everything here.

Let’s say that you want to be a tournament organizer and do tournament streams of an esport. You are going to use sponsorships and ad revenue to drive your profit, and you have a sponsor providing the prize pool.

You won’t be able to feature current league teams that are contractually obligated to participate in developer-endorsed events only, because the developer has all the leverage in being able to provide a larger prize pool for their official championship league (that is marketing budget for their game, funded by the game itself), so esports organizations are going to be locked-in to that contract.

The barrier to entry for you as an organizer is now to either pay a licensing fee to the developer for the privilege of being endorsed and allowing their contracted organizations to participate, which has a huge impact on your profitability… or to make your own fucking video game.

The open source aspect gives you:

- an existing player base

- ability to provide your own game rules

- ability to use exclusive visuals/assets

- ability to avoid licensing fees destroying your profitability

And if your organization goes under, the game lives on. If another organization goes under, you have opportunities to capture more of your market. You have the ability to improve your viewership by funding improvement of the game.

And, by the way, if you suck, somebody who can do it better will come along and take your money, which is actually good for the viewer and the player, which is much better than the way current games/leagues deteriorate.

Re: Show HN: Hacker League – Open-Source Rocket League on Linux

#52

Post by [deleted] »

JasonSage wrote: post #44
busterarm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree. With the exception of 1v1 fighting games, centralized/official servers are _required_ for esports to even work. Peer-to-peer communication models and self-hosted client-server games both are filled with cheaters. How would players ever feel comfortable competing on community/self-hosted server? "Esports" games require absolutely massive communities (e.g., marketing) and no open-source game has even com…

I think you’re conflating unrelated things Servers can be community-run and centralized per league/community. See TF2 (more decentralized) and FaceIt (Counter-Strike) for examples of self-moderating communities than can exist outside of the developer-centralized model. At no point do I assume P2P to be a requirement or even beneficial in this scenario.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Hacker League – Open-Source Rocket League on Linux

#53

Post by molli »

busterarm wrote: post #37
JasonSage wrote: post #19

I seriously, seriously think that in the future (possibly far future) various eSports will all be derived from a few open-source base games. The ability of game developers to leverage licensing, contracts with orgs, etc. to lock down a competitive ecosystem with exclusivity results in inability for a "free market" to develop around running events and broadcasts. Rocket League and League of Legends come to mind here,…

Hard disagree. With the exception of 1v1 fighting games, centralized/official servers are _required_ for esports to even work. Peer-to-peer communication models and self-hosted client-server games both are filled with cheaters. How would players ever feel comfortable competing on community/self-hosted server? "Esports" games require absolutely massive communities (e.g., marketing) and no open-source game has even com…

When a game is not popular anymore some developers just turn off their servers destroying the multiplayer. That won't happen with decentralized open source servers.

Re: Show HN: Hacker League – Open-Source Rocket League on Linux

#54

Post by JasonSage »

busterarm wrote: post #49
JasonSage wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re conflating unrelated things Servers can be community-run and centralized per league/community. See TF2 (more decentralized) and FaceIt (Counter-Strike) for examples of self-moderating communities than can exist outside of the developer-centralized model. At no point do I assume P2P to be a requirement or even beneficial in this scenario.

TF2 is overrun with bots right now to the point that the game is unplayable and the surviving community has been screaming at Valve about this for years. As for FaceIt, that came about from the existing CS community. After 15+ years of the game being out. You can't just build something like that in a vacuum. The whole point is that "esports" depends on centralized servers and somebody footing the bill for that. Even…

I’m optimistic that as the opportunities come along, players will take them.

Your argument sounds to me analogous to “everybody will just use Twitter/X because why would somebody want to pay to host a Mastodon instance with no participants.”

The reality is that some (but not all) people do genuinely have grief with the centralized platform (moderation, censorship, toxicity), do have the ability to pay for something better (or freeload off people who do care), and are thus willing to make a change with there’s sufficiently low resistance.

The reason this is possible at all is because people that did care in a very small minority made the decentralized platform for free while everybody else was oblivious. It doesn’t get built overnight and usage doesn’t convert overnight, but when the solution exists it can then be viable.

I do think open source games are a fair ways off, but I find it impossible to believe that people will work for decades for free on open source social media because they enjoy it, but the same will never be true of games.

It’s an eventuality, and it is one that changes dynamics for the end-consumer.

Re: Show HN: Hacker League – Open-Source Rocket League on Linux

#55

Post by vonunov »

mh- wrote: post #27
walr000s wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard Comm, a pro, once say that he wished he had his 14 year old fingers back...think he was 17 at a time. To me, a 40 year old playing with KBM, I feel like I just can't bend my brain around all of the 3d possibilities. I just don't have any intuition for rolling my car while it accelerates towards the front...and then you add in the complexity of the camera and, yeah, I suck.

I've only just started trying to do aerials, really, and I find myself getting vertigo from it haha. I'm also 40. It's so disorienting. None of the camera settings feel "right".

It takes some playing around with and is highly subjective. Best method I found was to just try camera configs used by pros or recommended by others and see what feels good. My current:

  Shake: off
  FOV: 110
  Distance: 280
  Height: 110
  Angle: -3.00
  Stiffness: 0.75
The rest aren't relevant for me because swivel speed is about looking with the right stick and transition speed is about switching to/from ball cam, and I leave ball cam on.

Of these, I believe the most important (by which I mean tangibly relevant to control quality/feel) are distance, stiffness, and, to some degree, height+angle. Shake and FOV are also important, but those are the only good values for those settings.

I used to play with max distance because it felt better for visibility, but I found some people saying 270/280 works much better for them for precise ball control and accurate strikes, and that does seem to be the case. Stiffness is the other setting that will make the most difference in feel: Lower values let the camera's distance from your car rubber-band further in relation to your speed. It might seem as if maxing this out would be ideal, because why wouldn't you want the camera to follow your movement as closely as possible, and why would you want the camera to lag behind you when you go faster and disorient you when you're trying to aerial? But I'm not so sure. I've tried stiffness at 1 (max) and I don't remember why, but apparently it didn't work for me, because I lowered it to 0.75, which I guess I found acceptable enough not to have changed it. I've just come across some people saying a stiffness of around 0.35 is counterintuitively great as it turns out that moving the car without instantly moving the camera helps a lot with car control for some reason, so I'm about to test run that value myself and see about it.

Re: Show HN: Hacker League – Open-Source Rocket League on Linux

#56

Post by Cieric »

I find projects like this really fun, but when it comes to being a game I am seeing a lot of problems.

- renderer and physics aren't synced in any way, physics shouldn't be tied to frame rate, but running as 2 separate threads with no synchronization means you might read garbage at some points if you render while the physics thread is updating.

- physics using this_thread::sleep_for is not accurate and can sleep for longer than the specified time, assuming the period to be 1/60 isn't correct. The delta time needs to be measured.

- using VK_PRESENT_MODE_FIFO_KHR or VK_PRESENT_MODE_MAILBOX_KHR force vsync, but vsync can be anything. With the physics system being locked to 60, you'll notice a stutter on non-mulitiple vsyncs like 144hz. There aren't many solutions I know for this, but the main ones I know of are interpolation and extrapolation of the physics state based on the framerate. I would bump the physics update rate to 120hz to match rocket league and then experiment from there.

- Using both Eigen and GLM is overkill in this case, both are slow, but if sticking with one I would use switch solely glm.

- More of a nitpick, but I would separate out all the code at least between rendering and physics to their own independent files. The vulkan api on it's own adds a lot of clutter, moving that to it's own file should make the project easier to navigate and explorer.

There are more things, like how hard coded that shaders are, but I assume the vulkan renderer will be improved past just being from the vulkan-tutorial, so advice for that can't really be given till the renderer has been updated.

P.S. Sorry if any of this sounds harsh, it's not my intention. I've just done a lot of work involving games, game engines and renderers. And I'm seeing a lot of the problems I made when I first started. I wish you the best of luck with your project.

Re: Show HN: Hacker League – Open-Source Rocket League on Linux

#59

Post by JasonSage »

busterarm wrote: post #49
JasonSage wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re conflating unrelated things Servers can be community-run and centralized per league/community. See TF2 (more decentralized) and FaceIt (Counter-Strike) for examples of self-moderating communities than can exist outside of the developer-centralized model. At no point do I assume P2P to be a requirement or even beneficial in this scenario.

TF2 is overrun with bots right now to the point that the game is unplayable and the surviving community has been screaming at Valve about this for years. As for FaceIt, that came about from the existing CS community. After 15+ years of the game being out. You can't just build something like that in a vacuum. The whole point is that "esports" depends on centralized servers and somebody footing the bill for that. Even…

> TF2 is overrun with bots right now to the point that the game is unplayable and the surviving community has been screaming at Valve about this for years.

Perfect example. With the existence of a sufficiently-close open-source base, the community would have self-organized TF2 out of existence with a functional replacement. This just isn’t possible today, but when it is possible there will be no turning back.

Re: Show HN: Hacker League – Open-Source Rocket League on Linux

#60

Post by molli »

polyvisual wrote: post #16

I've been playing different styles and genres of video games ever since Wolfenstein 3D and I consider myself pretty adept at playing them. However, Rocket League is one game that I just can't master. I've tried, really really tried, but I just can't play it with any amount of skill. It's a shame, as it looks really fun and I hear my son and his mates having a ball when they play.

Maybe you will be good at Hacker League:)
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