Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fixing the Internet for Games

gafferongames.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 97 posts

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#51

Post by golergka »

Impossible wrote: post #24
AntiRush wrote: post #18

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,…

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.

That's not really a lock-on. The "tube" level of multiplayer stack can usually be abstracted away even easier than graphics API (and almost no modern game engine supports less than at least two of those). Just compose a packet of a reasonable amount of bytes, configure a connection overall profile (reliable/unreliable, which usually, but not necessary, maps to TCP/UDP), and you're done.

I'd be much more afraid of vendor lock-in that actually runs throughought your code base and shapes it.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#52

Post by Insanity »

Modern games have a problem that I believe is a direct consequence of consoles. The lack of a server browser.

Just let me choose a server to which I have a good connection and I will be much happier. Instead of dropping me in games with random people all the time with random connection issues.

One of the main reasons I don't play fps on the consoles is missing this. (And there are social advantages of playing with the same 'random' people as well).

Having a server browser does not solve all issues mentioned in his presentation, but it does at least inform the player of the connection before they join a game.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#53

Post by gsich »

Insanity wrote: post #52

Modern games have a problem that I believe is a direct consequence of consoles. The lack of a server browser. Just let me choose a server to which I have a good connection and I will be much happier. Instead of dropping me in games with random people all the time with random connection issues. One of the main reasons I don't play fps on the consoles is missing this. (And there are social advantages of playing with th…

Random players can work with proper servers too, and many games just do that.

The problem with server browsers, or user hosted servers are/were arbitrary rules enforced by the admin of that server. It's what killed Black Ops 1 on the PC.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#54

Post by gsich »

Animats wrote: post #49

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…

Mostly it's just UDP with some TCP like reliable transfer built on top of it.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#55

Post by cjslep »

gsich wrote: post #53
Insanity wrote: post #52

Modern games have a problem that I believe is a direct consequence of consoles. The lack of a server browser. Just let me choose a server to which I have a good connection and I will be much happier. Instead of dropping me in games with random people all the time with random connection issues. One of the main reasons I don't play fps on the consoles is missing this. (And there are social advantages of playing with th…

Random players can work with proper servers too, and many games just do that. The problem with server browsers, or user hosted servers are/were arbitrary rules enforced by the admin of that server. It's what killed Black Ops 1 on the PC.

The benefit of the server browsers is that there were tons of positive gaming communities that competed around making the best and friendliest server possible in the early 2000's. I fondly remember playing Call of Duty as a tween with other community members that were adults and learned how to have fun, manage disagreements, and deal with problematic people without screaming profanities and raging about other peoples' mother.

The death of self-hosted servers means the death of admin powers which means the death of building a gaming community one wants to see come to fruition. Those admin powers are key to protecting vulnerable people from general assholes. And the "modern" online "report a person" is woefully laughable in comparison.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#56

Post by gsich »

cjslep wrote: post #55
gsich wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random players can work with proper servers too, and many games just do that. The problem with server browsers, or user hosted servers are/were arbitrary rules enforced by the admin of that server. It's what killed Black Ops 1 on the PC.

The benefit of the server browsers is that there were tons of positive gaming communities that competed around making the best and friendliest server possible in the early 2000's. I fondly remember playing Call of Duty as a tween with other community members that were adults and learned how to have fun, manage disagreements, and deal with problematic people without screaming profanities and raging about other peoples…

Often times admins are the assholes here (kick for using weapon X, perk Y, attachment Z) and you have no way prior to connecting to know which stupid rules are now in place.

(that and the fact that dedicated servers in BO1 meant you could rent them just from one or two places, no files for you)

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#57

Post by simonsays2 »

This sort of stuff has been around for a while, it helps some, but realistically your game needs to be designed from the ground up with latency and stutter in mind. If you do this, you wont need the complexity and expense of this sort of thing.

First you need client side prediction and smoothing. Next, you must design your game so it follows certain very strict rules about player interaction. These rules allow the players to feel the have real time synchronization when in fact synchronization is lazy. The specific rules required are different for each game, and must be nailed down before game design begins.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#58

Post by kingosticks »

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 thing I'm still a bit confused about is: is this a limitation with how their networks fundamentally work, or an artefact of my product choice when I buy a relatively cheap home Internet service? i.e. if I want a specialist low-latency and low-jitter link, could I not just pay for those benefits by purchasing a business-grade service? Or is there no distinction once the data gets onto a peered-network?

Or is the idea here that I don't have to cough up for all the benefits of that superior product when I only want some of them and only some of the time?

And this whole thing does rely on the bottleneck not being at then edge, which I don't see any proof of or reason for. EDIT: is there any proof/data to support this?

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#59

Post by Insanity »

gsich wrote: post #53
Insanity wrote: post #52

Modern games have a problem that I believe is a direct consequence of consoles. The lack of a server browser. Just let me choose a server to which I have a good connection and I will be much happier. Instead of dropping me in games with random people all the time with random connection issues. One of the main reasons I don't play fps on the consoles is missing this. (And there are social advantages of playing with th…

Random players can work with proper servers too, and many games just do that. The problem with server browsers, or user hosted servers are/were arbitrary rules enforced by the admin of that server. It's what killed Black Ops 1 on the PC.

Yeah but then you just go to a server with good admins..

Those servers are the reason games like CoD4 and CS survived for decade(s).

You get the power of choice.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#60

Post by Insanity »

gsich wrote: post #56
cjslep wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The benefit of the server browsers is that there were tons of positive gaming communities that competed around making the best and friendliest server possible in the early 2000's. I fondly remember playing Call of Duty as a tween with other community members that were adults and learned how to have fun, manage disagreements, and deal with problematic people without screaming profanities and raging about other peoples…

Often times admins are the assholes here (kick for using weapon X, perk Y, attachment Z) and you have no way prior to connecting to know which stupid rules are now in place. (that and the fact that dedicated servers in BO1 meant you could rent them just from one or two places, no files for you)

At least on CoD4, people would often play the same servers with the rules they liked.

Banning boring weapons is a good thing. Also, some servers mentioned the main rules in the name.

Post reply on HN