21–30 of 97 posts
Interesting to see if they can keep the 10-second update intervals while scaling to more users.
Curious to see if the market actually wants to pay for marginal improvements in gaming latency. I would have expected something like this targeting VoIP to be more lucrative.
The Internet is optimized for throughput at lowest cost. No amount of good netcode that you write can compensate for this. The problem is the internet itself. The internet doesn’t care about your game. The Internet did change, such that streaming movies became viable. Given that games are now bigger than movies, could it be argued that that the network lag we're seeing is the industry lagging behind the culture? (Whi…
> What happens to net neutrality? Counterintuitively, the market that Network Next is making shifts us closer to actual net neutrality than relying on the benevolence of FCC or Comcast by putting power into the hands of content providers where previously they were at the mercy of last-mile ISPs. If businesses can collectively bid for performance from private networks to offset actions by last-mile ISPs to cut costs a…
You realize this is exactly what net neutrality prohibits?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What happens to net neutrality? Counterintuitively, the market that Network Next is making shifts us closer to actual net neutrality than relying on the benevolence of FCC or Comcast by putting power into the hands of content providers where previously they were at the mercy of last-mile ISPs. If businesses can collectively bid for performance from private networks to offset actions by last-mile ISPs to cut costs a…
> If businesses can collectively bid for performance from private networks You realize this is exactly what net neutrality prohibits?
To the poster who said that we are trying to restore the true spirit of network neutrality. Bravo, you get it. This is exactly what we intend to do.
Valve recently announced partner access to their network backbone which addresses a lot of the problems mentioned here: * Access to our network, giving your players protection from attack, 100% reliable NAT traversal, and improved connectivity. * Tools for instantly estimating the ping between two arbitrary hosts without sending any packets. * A high quality end-to-end encrypted reliable-over-UDP protocol. >> Second,…
This is epic. Great to see that someone who's been such a good support to the gaming community with his excellent learning resources is also being successful in his business. It's also interesting to see these "private internet" endeavours have popped up to solve centralization issues on the internet. Streaming sites like Youtube and Netflix have solved it in similar way, striking deals with ISPs, as have the big CDN…
Clever concept. I wonder if they'll publish any more information on how their service works. Things like what this 'route shader' is that people can read without having to go through Email-Our-Sales-Team shit.
It's a custom bidding script that tells their real-time auction platform how much you want to pay for route improvements for a particular user session. Typically, shaders are used to move vertices in 3d meshes or color pixels in the GPU. Network Next is just using the term in a creative way to help connect to their audience, but it's nothing different than a bidding model.
As someone who works in the games space, I find this to be an interesting proposition. My primary concern revolves around similar 'net neutrality' aspects - more and more of the internet is becoming pay to play, this just further entrenches that theory if you want the best networking for your games as a studio.
That's a good observation. Given the alternative between bidding for performance from Network Next vs paying some flat fee to Comcast, et al. directly, I'd go with NN and let them deal with Comcast. ... and then maybe add "faster gameplay" power ups to our loot boxes (kidding).
Plus, how could they get a fair price if they’re the small guy. Suppliers on Network Next cannot identify buyers and cannot have one price for one buyer and one for another. So now the small guys get the same price the big guys do and competition should drive the price down over time.
See also Haste, which has been doing this for a couple of years now: https://haste.net/ One thing that's interesting is how different these services need to be in different countries.
I think Network Next is developer-targeted, as opposed to Haste which offers a subscription service for gamers.
The Internet is optimized for throughput at lowest cost. No amount of good netcode that you write can compensate for this. The problem is the internet itself. The internet doesn’t care about your game. The Internet did change, such that streaming movies became viable. Given that games are now bigger than movies, could it be argued that that the network lag we're seeing is the industry lagging behind the culture? (Whi…