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Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)

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Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)

#31

Post by sodality2 »

hinkley wrote: post #30
r1chardnl wrote: post #7

Earlier 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.

I’m pretty sure the first wall hack I heard of was on the Quake engine so that must be something they fixed later on?

It's a matter of how aggressive is the fog of war and removal of irrelevant entities. Sometimes it's high, sometimes it's low. Too high, and people glitch into existence on high-latency connections. Too low, and you know exactly where people are far behind where you need to.

Many custom servers in games like CS enable a more aggressive version, in cases where you geographically will be close, so you can rule out high latency connections and have more aggressive fog of war.

Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)

#32

Post by hinkley »

aleksiy123 wrote: post #11
ncr100 wrote: post #4

Awesome 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 over…

Gunplay in FPS games like CSGO and Valorant are all about angles. Almost all of the action happens in the split moments of contact, as players transition from not seeing each other to seeing each other. So in that sense, corners are pretty much a point of contention for everyone at every level since most of the game is based around taking and holding corners/angles. The peeker vs holder relationship is pretty interes…

“Doors and corners” as Detective Miller was fond of saying.

Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)

#33

Post by hinkley »

sodality2 wrote: post #31
hinkley wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty sure the first wall hack I heard of was on the Quake engine so that must be something they fixed later on?

It's a matter of how aggressive is the fog of war and removal of irrelevant entities. Sometimes it's high, sometimes it's low. Too high, and people glitch into existence on high-latency connections. Too low, and you know exactly where people are far behind where you need to. Many custom servers in games like CS enable a more aggressive version, in cases where you geographically will be close, so you can rule out high…

I believe in the Quake case they made all the walls transparent so you could see everyone coming. Which means they weren’t doing much fog of war at the time.

Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)

#34

Post by nick_ »

jsheard wrote: post #27
nick_ wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC Counter-Strike had it back in ~2002.

I don't think it did officially, there were definitely server plugins that did it back in the day but AFAICT it wasn't official until this 2015 update: https://old.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/37ebes/maj... > Added trace-based visibility checks to prevent networking invisible enemy players. If you're remembering playing with the r_drawothermodels console command to get a faux-wallhack effect, that was still…

I'm referring to CS 1.2 or so, back in ~2002.

The thing I remember was that my friend's graphics card had a global transparency setting built in (AKA a wall-hack mode lol). You could see other players come into view as soon as the came into an area that was rendered. Then a CS patch came out and the players weren't visible until very shortly before they would become visible had we not had the uhh... transparency mode on haha.

Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)

#35

Post by HideousKojima »

Hikikomori wrote: post #25
dpratt wrote: post #19

Any discussion of the game’s requirement to install kernel-level anticheat hooks that inspect the memory of every process running on the system?

Basically the only anti cheat that is somewhat successful. Secure multiplayer matchmaking has its price unfortunately. But any process your user runs can read memory of other processes of the same user, Windows provides an API for it. So its not just kernel stuff that is scary.

>Basically the only anti cheat that is somewhat successful.

And yet Valorant and every other game with kernel-level anticheat seems to have been hacked anyways

Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)

#36

Post by jsheard »

nick_ wrote: post #34
jsheard wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it did officially, there were definitely server plugins that did it back in the day but AFAICT it wasn't official until this 2015 update: https://old.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/37ebes/maj... > Added trace-based visibility checks to prevent networking invisible enemy players. If you're remembering playing with the r_drawothermodels console command to get a faux-wallhack effect, that was still…

I'm referring to CS 1.2 or so, back in ~2002. The thing I remember was that my friend's graphics card had a global transparency setting built in (AKA a wall-hack mode lol). You could see other players come into view as soon as the came into an area that was rendered. Then a CS patch came out and the players weren't visible until very shortly before they would become visible had we not had the uhh... transparency mode…

Yeah that's the same deal as r_drawothermodels, crudely forcing the GPU to render objects that are behind other objects would give you a partial wallhack, but that wouldn't disable the engines occlusion culling so once it determined that an object was definitely no longer visible it would skip drawing it altogether, and you would stop seeing it through walls. "True" wallhacks were able to override the clients occlusion culling and reveal everything, so to defend against that the occlusion culling needs to happen on the server, which came much later.

Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)

#37

Post by dmoy »

hinkley wrote: post #32
aleksiy123 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gunplay in FPS games like CSGO and Valorant are all about angles. Almost all of the action happens in the split moments of contact, as players transition from not seeing each other to seeing each other. So in that sense, corners are pretty much a point of contention for everyone at every level since most of the game is based around taking and holding corners/angles. The peeker vs holder relationship is pretty interes…

“Doors and corners” as Detective Miller was fond of saying.

Staircases too. There's one of the more respected instructors up near here in northern Oregon who does civilian tactical training stuff. Which is not my cup of tea, but it is interesting listening to the guy rant. He has what appears to be a deep seated fear/loathing for staircases.

Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)

#38

Post by xor42 »

hinkley wrote: post #33
sodality2 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a matter of how aggressive is the fog of war and removal of irrelevant entities. Sometimes it's high, sometimes it's low. Too high, and people glitch into existence on high-latency connections. Too low, and you know exactly where people are far behind where you need to. Many custom servers in games like CS enable a more aggressive version, in cases where you geographically will be close, so you can rule out high…

I believe in the Quake case they made all the walls transparent so you could see everyone coming. Which means they weren’t doing much fog of war at the time.

Regarding the Quake engine and its evolutions (Q3, Call of duty, RTC Wolfenstein), the most common trick was to modify the rendering mode of all player entities so that they are drawn above everything else.

The engine has a flag that is mainly used to draw the player's weapon (which is rendered above the rest). Using this flag for players was the "engine compliant" way of making a wall hack.

Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)

#39

Post by nick_ »

jsheard wrote: post #36
nick_ wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm referring to CS 1.2 or so, back in ~2002. The thing I remember was that my friend's graphics card had a global transparency setting built in (AKA a wall-hack mode lol). You could see other players come into view as soon as the came into an area that was rendered. Then a CS patch came out and the players weren't visible until very shortly before they would become visible had we not had the uhh... transparency mode…

Yeah that's the same deal as r_drawothermodels, crudely forcing the GPU to render objects that are behind other objects would give you a partial wallhack, but that wouldn't disable the engines occlusion culling so once it determined that an object was definitely no longer visible it would skip drawing it altogether, and you would stop seeing it through walls. "True" wallhacks were able to override the clients occlusi…

Oh interesting. Thanks! We must have assumed it was client-side and gave up.

Re: Riot Games: Peeking into Valorant's Netcode (2020)

#40

Post by bob1029 »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #3

My 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…

> I wonder if having such low ping actually gave me a disadvantage when peeking towards someone with a 30 ms ping?

Yes. Counterintuitively, the players with the worst connections often get away with the most ridiculous nonsense.

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