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

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

technology.riotgames.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 93 posts

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

#81

Post by doublerabbit »

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.

NDA,

You're ever chasing the mouse. If it's not some hacker, it's some bug. If it's not a bug than its a feature and then all three.

Directors want results, 24 hour of stressful debugging to discover why some new person can now shoot through walls, creating a patch, replicating and ensuring it doesn't exploit or nuke any other feature and pushing the patch out without effecting gameplay is stressful. Partly why Overwatch had real-time patching abilities on each game.

You don't get downtime, no sitting on tickets. Hacking costs revenue and you got to ensure your work is correct.

Wake up the next day and start all over.

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

#83

Post by rglynn »

eertami wrote: post #75
serf wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

Community servers will definitely be the answer for this in the long run.

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

#84

Post by xn7 »

xyst wrote: post #73
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.

Riot has a notoriously toxic work environment, and recently has had massive rounds of layoffs[0]. And it’s extra bad for women, like at most game studios.

[0]: https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/2024-rioter-update - 11% of staff let go

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

#85

Post by dmoy »

hinkley wrote: post #50
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.

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.

They taught us this in fencing as a side discussion (like during a break). Apparently it isn't true, as other commenters pointed out.

The button side of jackets thing is true though, except usually also told wrong. We're often taught in fencing that men's jackets button left over right so that a sword drawn by a right handed person doesn't fuck up your own clothing. That's also wrong, but close: men's jackets button left over right because you traditionally put your shielded side forward, your left side, and you wanted any armor pieces to overlap so that there's no holes to get caught in if you're poked from the left. Which is a stance backwards from later style one handed fencing. The not messing up clothes on the draw of a sword is just extra bonus from the original reason.

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

#86

Post by dmoy »

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…

Thanks, that was really detailed and simple to understand, unlike the gravelly rants I've heard.

Sounds like a stairwalking robot that has 360° cameras would be pretty useful

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

#87

Post by HideousKojima »

plaguuuuuu wrote: post #51
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

AFAIK it's hard enough to develop the cheats that you need to pay for subscriptions to use them

The same is true of games with non-kernel anticheats

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

#88

Post by HideousKojima »

rglynn wrote: post #83
eertami wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 com…

Community servers will definitely be the answer for this in the long run.

Community servers were already the answer, but game devs and publishers have gone out of their way to make them a non-option for most games

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

#89

Post by nick_ »

nick_ wrote: post #39
jsheard wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

*server-side

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

#90

Post by msanlop »

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…

> so head takes all of it

Maybe you implied it, but adding to the 'going up' case, there is bullet ricochet -- also reffered to as skipping or bouncing bullets -- that makes it so that bullets will ricochet out at a shallow angle and ride out the wall or floor, making your head hittable without even aiming at it. Here is a instructional FBI video talking about it.[0] And a more modern take.[1]

[0] https://youtu.be/7tUW0cUkNv0?feature=shared&t=240 (I think the date is wrong, other places mark it as being from 1974-5)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT219NKPJh0

Post reply on HN