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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)

#71

Post by Hikikomori »

cmxch wrote: post #55
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.

Turning your PC into a $gaming_appliance with a keyboard (in terms of opaque and invasive security posture) isn’t so much of a success. Vanguard might be nice if you want to dedicate a PC to locked-down gaming, not so much if you just want to do legitimate $anything_else with it.

Can also stick to games that use good old dedicated servers with active admins that ban cheaters. Its the new matchmaking type of games that makes anti cheat software a requirement.

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

#72

Post by yapyap »

jsheard wrote: post #8
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.

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…

2015 was 9 years ago

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

#73

Post by xyst »

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.

The pressures at game studios are often very high. These game studios prey on people/gamers to “do it for the passion”.

Probably different at Riot? Not sure.

But companies like Blizzard/Activision and some smaller companies were described as very toxic environments.

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

#75

Post by eertami »

serf wrote: post #44
Hikikomori wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>barrier to entry for game cheating is lower than i've ever seen it

Matchmaking rather than finding opponents/matches on IRC and private servers is also a big factor modern cheating.

People are locked in to the game with you in Valorant or CS, they are penalised for leaving and thus can be held hostage by someone who is blatantly cheating.

In older times, you would just quit and find another match, or if it was a community public server they will get banned.

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

#76

Post by Gravityloss »

xor42 wrote: post #38
hinkley wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could also replace player model with a big spiky thing. The spikes would poke through walls.

Or in team fortress, replace the sniper's red aimpoint dot with a big model. They become easier to avoid.

Of course not great from large distance / players behind multiple walls but I think the server wouldn't send you the info of those guys anyway.

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

#77

Post by slumberlust »

xyst wrote: post #74

If they can only do this without having invasive anti-cheat installed at ring0. They would get a ton more praise from me. One of these days I’ll find a way to run Valorant in a windows vm

Riot has never been a company to prioritize doing things right when doing things easy is available.

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

#78

Post by jsheard »

yapyap wrote: post #72
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…

2015 was 9 years ago

9 years ago is relatively recent when talking about the design of the Quake engine and its descendents, which was established 28 years ago.

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

#79

Post by theupside »

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.

[dead]

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

#80

Post by InDubioProRubio »

seanw444 wrote: post #56
dmoy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They suck all around. Going down, your legs are exposed, then your chest, then you finally have the ability to see the next floor, so your gun and your eyes don't get down fast enough to be able to process the bad guys in time before you get filled with holes. Going up, your head is exposed, so that becomes the primary target, when people typically aim for center mass. But center mass isn't visible immediately, so he…

Imagine a handgrenade- with shotgunshells and 6 cameras glued to it. It can trigger the shotgun shells, giving it the ability to "hop" on a vector. It has a primitive friend/foe system (friends are behind the plane it was launched from) all else is foe. You throw it at the start of the stair-case it hops up, blows the door open, enters the room, finds a target, explodes near it. All in a series of bangs.

I call it the hedgehog. It lifes here now. Very good at trench clearing too. https://imgur.com/a/hedgehog-De90woA

Bonuspoints if it can be transported and drone dropped!

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