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

technology.riotgames.com

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

#41

Post by Hikikomori »

HideousKojima wrote: post #35
Hikikomori wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Its not bulletproof, but nothing really can be on the PC platform as it is today. Which is why I said somewhat successful, as no other anti cheat comes close.

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

#42

Post by Syntaf »

I can't help but envy the engineers in this article as I sit here, procrastinating my fulltime career as a glorified CRUD engineer with complementary soft skills.

Maybe the grass is always greener, but it just sounds like an incredible opportunity for anyone working on the Valorant team. You get to solve challenging, interesting problems that hundreds of millions of users will benefit from, that's just so cool to me.

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

#43

Post by ldoughty »

Syntaf wrote: post #42

I can't help but envy the engineers in this article as I sit here, procrastinating my fulltime career as a glorified CRUD engineer with complementary soft skills. Maybe the grass is always greener, but it just sounds like an incredible opportunity for anyone working on the Valorant team. You get to solve challenging, interesting problems that hundreds of millions of users will benefit from, that's just so cool to me.

I generally agree that "the grass is greener" is common for IT people I think. It's a huge field, and you hear about people doing cool things all the time.

But on the flip side, that one cool thing might be the ONLY thing they do, all day, every day, which might not be as cool after 6-10 years.

But I do think your point about benefitting large numbers of people is a strong motivator..that's partly what academia relies on to keep employees as below-market rates -- the mission oriented drive to make the future better. I don't mean to poke at that issue specifically, but it's a great example of how teachers, etc. will continue to work for pennies as long as they can afford it (it's almost abusive).. but that drive is a critical part of their personal happiness

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

#44

Post by serf »

Hikikomori wrote: post #41
HideousKojima wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

Its not bulletproof, but nothing really can be on the PC platform as it is today. Which is why I said somewhat successful, as no other anti cheat comes close.

it's not really a PC problem, its an attestability problem.

Even with kernel level nonsense a cheat can be made technically undetectable by essentially making a 'player robot' that uses a camera and CV to watch a screen and traditional mouse/keyboard interfaces. It'll only be detectable via player-action/movement heuristics and 'best guesses', and it needs no hooks into software or OS.

This type of 'bot' is going to explode across consoles and the like soon given the focus on AI with general purpose reasoning; you can already easily implement this style of bot against slow paced games like mahjong or poker inferring against big clunky slow image-inferring LLMs; given how easy most coding LLMs can spit out the code for specialty CNNs when knowing the criteria we're going to see this kind of cheating get a lot more accessible.

And I mean this practically. Go talk to Claude or ChatGPT about making a bot in this fashion for just about any slower paced deliberate-action game -- it's shockingly good at doing so with very little user input. Provide it with a few screenshots of the interface and it can even automate finding the bounding boxes or whatever other thing-of-interest you need to coordinate purely by description -- the barrier to entry for game cheating is lower than i've ever seen it , and that's one of the things I did for a living for a portion of my youth.

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

#45

Post by devmor »

I find it kind of weird that this is framed like a novel solution and discovery process when this has existed since the early 2000’s in other tactical FPS games.

Did the author do no research into the competition/precursors before going down this path?

Did they lie to make it seem more impressive?

Whatever the case, it’s odd.

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

#46

Post by ZephyrBlu »

ldoughty wrote: post #43
Syntaf wrote: post #42

I can't help but envy the engineers in this article as I sit here, procrastinating my fulltime career as a glorified CRUD engineer with complementary soft skills. Maybe the grass is always greener, but it just sounds like an incredible opportunity for anyone working on the Valorant team. You get to solve challenging, interesting problems that hundreds of millions of users will benefit from, that's just so cool to me.

I generally agree that "the grass is greener" is common for IT people I think. It's a huge field, and you hear about people doing cool things all the time. But on the flip side, that one cool thing might be the ONLY thing they do, all day, every day, which might not be as cool after 6-10 years. But I do think your point about benefitting large numbers of people is a strong motivator..that's partly what academia relie…

> But on the flip side, that one cool thing might be the ONLY thing they do, all day, every day, which might not be as cool after 6-10 years

Yeah, sometimes I think I'd like to be a systems engineer and work on databases or similar but then I think about that being 100% of my work and realize I don't desire that kind of job.

This stuff seems fun until you realize it means you're choosing to specialize in something pretty niche. I prefer being a product engineer working on web stuff for now until I find something worthwhile specializing in.

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

#47

Post by greenthrow »

Syntaf wrote: post #42

I can't help but envy the engineers in this article as I sit here, procrastinating my fulltime career as a glorified CRUD engineer with complementary soft skills. Maybe the grass is always greener, but it just sounds like an incredible opportunity for anyone working on the Valorant team. You get to solve challenging, interesting problems that hundreds of millions of users will benefit from, that's just so cool to me.

Talk to people who have actually worked in the games industry. It's terrible.

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

#48

Post by coverj »

renewiltord wrote: post #28
jsheard wrote: post #8

Earlier 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…

Oh great video. Thanks for sharing. Surely the tick rate has to be lower on FACEIT as a consequence? Maybe this is why everyone in matchmaking would talk about it.

at this time valve official servers were 64 tick and FACEIT 128 tick.

This has been replaced by 'subtick' which I don't know enough about to comment.

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

#49

Post by CodeArtisan »

ancieque wrote: post #9
jsheard wrote: post #8

Earlier 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.

Probably CSGuard/HLGuard. It had a popular wallhack-block feature that was using a lot of CPU.

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

#50

Post by hinkley »

dmoy wrote: post #37
hinkley wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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.

I've heard that the stairs in castles all spiral the same direction so the disadvantage from being higher up on the steps is counterbalanced by having more space to swing your sword arm without blunting it on walls or the steps. Or at least if you're right-handed.
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