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Fixing the Internet for Games

gafferongames.com

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Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#11

Post by politician »

VectorLock wrote: post #6

Clever concept. I wonder if they'll publish any more information on how their service works. Things like what this 'route shader' is that people can read without having to go through Email-Our-Sales-Team shit.

It's a custom bidding script that tells their real-time auction platform how much you want to pay for route improvements for a particular user session.

Typically, shaders are used to move vertices in 3d meshes or color pixels in the GPU. Network Next is just using the term in a creative way to help connect to their audience, but it's nothing different than a bidding model.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#12

Post by stcredzero »

The Internet is optimized for throughput at lowest cost.

No amount of good netcode that you write can compensate for this.

The problem is the internet itself.

The internet doesn’t care about your game.

The Internet did change, such that streaming movies became viable. Given that games are now bigger than movies, could it be argued that that the network lag we're seeing is the industry lagging behind the culture? (Which it generally does, at least a little.)

A part of this might well involve special deals between large companies involving specialized infrastructure. There are such things now involved with movie streaming. Google's plans involve the infrastructure part of that already. What happens to net neutrality?

Once game streaming becomes mature, then it's only a matter of time for App streaming to follow. We'll be back in the mainframe days, just with much larger companies with much larger multi-box cloud "mainframes", commanding the attention of a much larger portion of the population and the culture. "The computer is your friend. Trust the computer!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#13

Post by politician »

AlimJaffer wrote: post #10

As someone who works in the games space, I find this to be an interesting proposition. My primary concern revolves around similar 'net neutrality' aspects - more and more of the internet is becoming pay to play, this just further entrenches that theory if you want the best networking for your games as a studio.

That's a good observation. Given the alternative between bidding for performance from Network Next vs paying some flat fee to Comcast, et al. directly, I'd go with NN and let them deal with Comcast.

... and then maybe add "faster gameplay" power ups to our loot boxes (kidding).

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#14

Post by Jare »

tschwimmer wrote: post #2

This was an awesome write up. The most interesting thing for me was learning that bottlenecks are not on the edge, but across the backbone because T1 carriers are optimizing for low cost, not low latency.

The Riot links are pretty great too, very much worth it.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#15

Post by swiftcoder »

weberc2 wrote: post #5
mjevans wrote: post #4

Other things that can help: * A national policy that actually encourages competition > Also one that classifies 'the last mile' as public infrastructure to compete on top of. * Fiber to the home/MDU (Ethernet the rest of the way) * Where cable Internet must be used, the anti-buffer bloat parts of DOCSIS 3.1 (DOCSIS-PIE). * Actually having peer to peer focused ISPs, not content consumption ones. Upload should be no le…

> A national policy that actually encourages competition I'm all for improving the Internet and dunking on large ISPs, but what does this mean? Specifically what kind of national policy would foster competition (regulation tends to favor monopolies, right?)? Also, don't these private networks and marketplaces constitute competition? Or are you talking specifically about the network edge while the article is talking a…

Anti-trust action against the major telecoms would not favour monopolies, certainly :)

There are other regulatory levers here, though. Prevent municipal governments from awarding monopolies to providers (Boston and Comcast, I'm looking at you). Require last-mile fiber owners to lease to multiple competing companies. And so on...

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#16

Post by kbenson »

weberc2 wrote: post #5
mjevans wrote: post #4

Other things that can help: * A national policy that actually encourages competition > Also one that classifies 'the last mile' as public infrastructure to compete on top of. * Fiber to the home/MDU (Ethernet the rest of the way) * Where cable Internet must be used, the anti-buffer bloat parts of DOCSIS 3.1 (DOCSIS-PIE). * Actually having peer to peer focused ISPs, not content consumption ones. Upload should be no le…

> A national policy that actually encourages competition I'm all for improving the Internet and dunking on large ISPs, but what does this mean? Specifically what kind of national policy would foster competition (regulation tends to favor monopolies, right?)? Also, don't these private networks and marketplaces constitute competition? Or are you talking specifically about the network edge while the article is talking a…

> but maybe this is antithetical to net neutrality

By separating the bulk transit last mile provider from the private network direct routing solutions, I think we actually guard against a lot of the problems net neutrality is meant to fight (as long as the ISP doesn't classify the private network provider as higher tier). Net neutrality is only really needed because there's not enough competition in the ISP space for large swaths of the country. If we each had 4-5 ISP choices, net neutrality actually starts being a negative, because it impacts types of offerings that might require special priority routing to work well and that are willing to pay for it. The market would probably settle on specific plans where consumers may or may not pay for better streaming/gaming capability, and that's a good thing. There would be no chance for an ISP to strong-arm a content provider because no ISP would have enough market share to do so (customers that care would just jump ship to another ISP if youtube/facebook/whetever ran like crap and another ISP advertised better speeds for them).

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#17

Post by politician »

stcredzero wrote: post #12

The Internet is optimized for throughput at lowest cost. No amount of good netcode that you write can compensate for this. The problem is the internet itself. The internet doesn’t care about your game. The Internet did change, such that streaming movies became viable. Given that games are now bigger than movies, could it be argued that that the network lag we're seeing is the industry lagging behind the culture? (Whi…

> What happens to net neutrality?

Counterintuitively, the market that Network Next is making shifts us closer to actual net neutrality than relying on the benevolence of FCC or Comcast by putting power into the hands of content providers where previously they were at the mercy of last-mile ISPs.

If businesses can collectively bid for performance from private networks to offset actions by last-mile ISPs to cut costs and reduce service, then they also have the power to organize a general strike by refusing to bid for performance from traffic from specific ISPs until they work out better rates throughout the value chain.

So I see this as a mechanism to restore the spirit of net neutrality despite the best wishes of the FCC.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#18

Post by AntiRush »

Valve recently announced partner access to their network backbone which addresses a lot of the problems mentioned here:

    * Access to our network, giving your players protection from attack, 100% reliable NAT traversal, and improved connectivity.
    * Tools for instantly estimating the ping between two arbitrary hosts without sending any packets.
    * A high quality end-to-end encrypted reliable-over-UDP protocol.
>> Second, clients can select a route that gets off of the public Internet and onto our dedicated links as early as possible. On our backbone we can ensure that the routing is optimal, since we have peered with over 2,500 ISPs. We also prioritize the latency-sensitive game traffic over HTTP content downloads, which we can afford to do because game traffic makes up a relatively small percentage of our overall bandwidth utilization. And on our backbone, a sudden surge of traffic unrelated to gaming won’t degrade the experience.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks#announcements/d...

They started using it in some of their games a couple of years ago (Counterstrike Global Offensive and Dota2 if I recall correctly).

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#20

Post by tinco »

This is epic. Great to see that someone who's been such a good support to the gaming community with his excellent learning resources is also being successful in his business.

It's also interesting to see these "private internet" endeavours have popped up to solve centralization issues on the internet. Streaming sites like Youtube and Netflix have solved it in similar way, striking deals with ISPs, as have the big CDN's, simply putting their machines at the ISP's datacenters.

Network.Next is solving this for the gaming domain, but there is a more general preferential routing on the internet problem this idea could be expanded to.

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