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Fixing the Internet for Games

gafferongames.com

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Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#41

Post by Impossible »

est31 wrote: post #36
Impossible wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is great if Steam is your only platform and you want to be tied to Valve forever, but as soon as you want your game on mobile, console or even another PC store like Epic or GOG you need another solution.

Microsoft and Apple are far worse IMO by pushing their proprietary graphics APIs. I see Valve more as their competitor than as a threatening monopoly. In the future, things can change though, nothing is fixed.

More "graphics API is the worst lock in possible"... With an online game it's way easier to escape graphics "lock in", especially considering almost everyone is using a game engine (Unreal or Unity) that hides most implementation details from you. There are challenges with porting graphics apis are different shader languages but with glslang and dxc supporting different languages it's basically a solved problem. The main issue with service lock-in, and why it's worse than proprietary graphics APIs is that it blocks cross play. So even if you wrap the API for different platforms Steam users cannot play with Xbox users, etc. The idea that graphics API is the biggest bottleneck to game portability (especially across systems that also have proprietary windowing systems, threads, audio, input, programming languages, network libraries, etc) because John Carmack said we should use OpenGL 20 years ago needs to die.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#42

Post by kbenson »

bilbo0s wrote: post #35
soup10 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i hate these underhanded "use this cool feature that we made to lock you in to our platform" tactics

??? Isn't the entire point of the original article to lock you into the Network Next platform by forcing you to implement their SDK? I think every network provider is going to work to lock you into their platform.

Well, in defense of Network Next, their system seems to fall back to public routes if there's no benefit. That doesn't seem too much like lock in, since you have to have public servers working anyway.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#43

Post by jay_kyburz »

gafferongames wrote: post #25
tinco wrote: post #20

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…

Thank you very much.

How about some Tribes Jetpack action!

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#46

Post by kbenson »

gafferongames wrote: post #26
politician wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Route shaders select the best route out of multiple ones available. Right now they could be used to for example, specify basic things like: acceptable latency (eg. I don’t want to pay to optimize a player’s session from 20ms down to 19ms, 20 is good enough), minimum improvement vs. public internet before a session takes network next (eg. 5ms improvement or greater), and of course maximum price for the bid. If we don’…

The really interesting thing I see for this is a possible other route for game revenue in the future. Instead of paying up front (traditional) pricing or advertising, or cosmetic (or not so cosmetic) in game purchases, you could have two tiers, free and optimized latency for a cost.

Or some combination. Cosmetic in-game purchases aren't necessarily bad, but the amount my son has spent and tries to continue to spend (I strictly limit what of his money he can waste on it now) on fortnite stuff is ridiculous and concerning. A sane middle ground would be helpful.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#47

Post by fulafel »

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…

To add to the bandwidth characerisation:

Bandwidth has followed an improvement curve since the early days of the internet, though it has slowed down a lot lately.

Streaming movies became viable despite the slowing rate of bandwidth improvement. We had 30 kbps modems in the 90s, then 8 Mbit ADSL1 in 1998, 24 MBit ADSL 2+ in 2003s, 40 MBit DOCSIS around the same times. If the speeds had continued to improve at the same exponential curve, consumers would have 100+ gig broadband by now.

The same is true about datacenters, the bandwidth per compute capacity available to servers has decreased for a while.

Bandwidth is an easier problem than latency, because it's not limited by speed of light.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#48

Post by cma »

est31 wrote: post #36
Impossible wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is great if Steam is your only platform and you want to be tied to Valve forever, but as soon as you want your game on mobile, console or even another PC store like Epic or GOG you need another solution.

Microsoft and Apple are far worse IMO by pushing their proprietary graphics APIs. I see Valve more as their competitor than as a threatening monopoly. In the future, things can change though, nothing is fixed.

Try using Valve's game controller outside of Steam. Huge PITA.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#49

Post by Animats »

Games need some low latency data, but not much. Player actions, character movement, and maybe bullets need low latency. Asset downloading does not. If you had a dial up modem running over a non-packet phone network, and didn't overload the buffering, you'd have better latency than the Internet.

Many games make this distinction already. The latency-critical stuff goes over UDP, and it's limited to data where a missing packet is superseded by the next packet. Nothing is retransmitted. Bulk data goes over TCP, with reliable retransmission but more delay.

It's too bad ISDN died off. 64Kb/s end to end, not packetization delay, and no jitter. The ideal gamer network would be an ISDN connection and a IP connection in parallel.

If we had QoS systems where 1% of your maximum data rate could be at high priority, this, and the VoIP problem, would be mostly solved.

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