Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)
technology.riotgames.com
Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)
1–10 of 93 posts
Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)
#2A related article on refining their netcode to minimise the usefulness of wallhacks:
https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-...
Not many first person games have that "fog of war", it turns out to be quite hard to implement well.
Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)
#3My fun anecdote...
Some of Valorant's game servers are hosted in a data center very close to my house. When I played, my ping was in the single digit milliseconds. Some people accused me of being a Riot employee.
Of course, that low ping didn't prevent me from being utter trash. My K/D ratio was usually around 0.3.
Come to think of it, seeing the network buffering they perform, I wonder if having such low ping actually gave me a disadvantage when peeking towards someone with a 30 ms ping?
Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)
#4Awesome insight.
While playing FPS', I wondered why corners were a point of contention for me, both in dying or killing, and now I have additional insight.
I can sit at a corner and die from an oncoming enemy, or I can take the corner and take the enemy. I assumed it was all due to my own biological perceptual system, and now I see the synchronization would be giving each player an advantage depending upon who's overtaking the corner.
Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)
#5My fun anecdote... Some of Valorant's game servers are hosted in a data center very close to my house. When I played, my ping was in the single digit milliseconds. Some people accused me of being a Riot employee. Of course, that low ping didn't prevent me from being utter trash. My K/D ratio was usually around 0.3. Come to think of it, seeing the network buffering they perform, I wonder if having such low ping actual…
Ha! "Hax0r!1!@~"
Did you feel it potentially made the game MORE fun for you, having that high ping? I presume yes?
Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)
#6It's sort of neat that the same FPS networking fundamentals have stood the test of 25 years of game time, and it's a good historical lesson for those entering the industry or hobbyists to just study what architecture came out of Quakeworld.
Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)
#7A related article on refining their netcode to minimise the usefulness of wallhacks: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-... Not many first person games have that "fog of war", it turns out to be quite hard to implement well.
Didn't most first person games have this automatically because of using the Quake engine due to their PVS system? It was used to reduce drawing overhead but also beneficial in not sending more data than needed and preserve bandwidth serversided.
Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)
#8A related article on refining their netcode to minimise the usefulness of wallhacks: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/demolishing-wallhacks-... Not many first person games have that "fog of war", it turns out to be quite hard to implement well.
Didn't most first person games have this automatically because of using the Quake engine due to their PVS system? It was used to reduce drawing overhead but also beneficial in not sending more data than needed and preserve bandwidth serversided.
AFAIK no they didn't, Valves engines are from the Quake lineage and still use PVS but they only added serverside fog-of-war to Counter Strike relatively recently in ~2015. As the Valorant article goes into, it's a harder problem than it appears because you need to allow the client some wiggle room to know an enemy in coming around a corner before the player sees them so that lag compensation and shadows work correctly (Valorant sidesteps the shadow issue by simply not having players cast shadows). Plus PVS is quite coarse so if you want precise culling you need a more computationally expensive solution.
This video compares Valves own fog-of-war implementation to the implementation used by FACEIT, a third party competitive matchmaking service, which shows there's a pretty wide range of trade-offs to be made. Valve went for conservative and fast, while FACEIT went for aggressive and (presumably) slow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8w1ICIBO3D4
Valves implementation is better than nothing, it at least stops cheaters from knowing which direction the other team is going at the start of a round, but beyond that it doesn't stop them from knowing exactly where most enemies are standing around corners because the serverside visibility checks are so coarse.
Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't most first person games have this automatically because of using the Quake engine due to their PVS system? It was used to reduce drawing overhead but also beneficial in not sending more data than needed and preserve bandwidth serversided.
AFAIK no they didn't, Valves engines are from the Quake lineage and still use PVS but they only added serverside fog-of-war to Counter Strike relatively recently in ~2015. As the Valorant article goes into, it's a harder problem than it appears because you need to allow the client some wiggle room to know an enemy in coming around a corner before the player sees them so that lag compensation and shadows work correctl…
I remember installing a metamod plugin to my cs 1.5 Server that added server side fog of war iirc. But i could be mixing things up.
Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK no they didn't, Valves engines are from the Quake lineage and still use PVS but they only added serverside fog-of-war to Counter Strike relatively recently in ~2015. As the Valorant article goes into, it's a harder problem than it appears because you need to allow the client some wiggle room to know an enemy in coming around a corner before the player sees them so that lag compensation and shadows work correctl…
I remember installing a metamod plugin to my cs 1.5 Server that added server side fog of war iirc. But i could be mixing things up.
SMAC certainly predates Valve’s official implementation, wouldn’t be surprising if something else also did it.