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How eSports are saving the PC industry

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Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#41

Post by derefr »

pjc50 wrote: post #29
derefr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it really weird that in inherently "networked" games (where there is a concept of a shared deterministic game-session physics-frame counter), the PC playing the game has to be the same PC rendering the game. You can recreate exactly the same view each player has from that player's outgoing network traffic! Thus, some alternatives to rendering on the user's own GPU come to mind: 1. instead of those HDMI-path re…

Lots of games used to offer "demo record" modes that did this - saving the data layer rather than the video. Or a "spectator mode". However, rendering it requires the exact same version of the game (including all mods) and typically there's no facility for high-fanout "spectator mode".

> rendering it requires the exact same version of the game (including all mods)

It feels like (most) studios are really dropping the ball on this one. Event-sourcing through "rules engines" isn't that hard; you can have a client that "remembers how to be" every past version of the client, network-sync/replay-sync wise. You just need to go into the game architecture phase knowing you're building a networked game.

As a free bonus, when you build a game engine this way, you can also "audit" ladder/tournament matches by (asynchronously!) running through the game physics on the server after the match, before letting the match determination influence each player's ranking. (And doing your cheat-detection post-match really eases the requirements on the client sync protocol!)

It's harder with mods, unless your mods are also cleanly separable into "presenter-level" and "rules engine" parts. Not that I've seen this particular innovation before, but if the "rules engine" parts of mods are all in some common bytecode, the particular "house rules" required to run a replay could be embedded in the replay itself, along with package URLs for fat clients (and renderer instances) to pull down the presenter bits as well.

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#42

Post by henryboston »

dageshi wrote: post #30
redml wrote: post #27

My biggest surprise is how this all runs on Microsoft's operating system and Microsoft does very little to nothing to facilitate this as a potential revenue stream. In fact they're just sitting by and watching as the biggest player, steam, is slowly taking their library off of windows and onto mac or linux.

I think Valve are getting games onto mac and linux in anticipation of an xBox store, or a locked down version of Win 10 with an xBox store coming in the future.

It's because Steam is developing their own hardware based off Linux. They want games to be able to run on their own hardware.

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#43

Post by danielvinson »

atom-morgan wrote: post #14
duiker101 wrote: post #11

I think that the base concepts of this article are wrong. eSports is not saving PC gaming because the games require the best hardware. In fact competitve games have some of the lowest requirements possible. Riot(League of Legends) goes out of their way all the time to make sure that their game will work even on the most outdated computers and really none of the competitive games have the most astonishing graphic. For…

> I don't know if it's still a thing but in Counter Strike people use very low resolutions to enhance performance, have better vision and reduce mouse movement. I can't say for sure with CS but I know it's definitely the case with StarCraft. I saw it firsthand when I was in Vegas for a competition and had the chance to spectate behind some of the competitors irl. All that I saw were on the lowest graphics settings.

This was a big thing in Counter Strike 1.6 due to it giving you in-game advantages. For example, all leagues eventually started requiring you to use 32-bit graphics because people were using 16-bit graphics to be able to see through smoke grenades. If you ran the bare minimum settings, you would be able to minimize the distractions and increase the contrast between players and the level, letting you focus on winning.

The main reason pros will use lower settings for CS:S or CS:GO is because it is incredibly important that the game runs perfectly smoothly so that it reacts consistently to their input. Since everyone is on 144hz monitors now, that means they will need to stay above 144fps at all times.

Now, most CS pros who are sponsored will have good hardware and can do this on 1920x1080, but the problem is that at LAN tournaments in foreign countries, it is much less common that hardware which can do this is available. So the pro players will purposely use something like 1024x768 because they know 100% that the computer they will be given at any tournament will handle that, and changing something like resolution would take a few days to get used to and they won't get that chance.

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#44

Post by moistgorilla »

duiker101 wrote: post #11

I think that the base concepts of this article are wrong. eSports is not saving PC gaming because the games require the best hardware. In fact competitve games have some of the lowest requirements possible. Riot(League of Legends) goes out of their way all the time to make sure that their game will work even on the most outdated computers and really none of the competitive games have the most astonishing graphic. For…

> I don't know if it's still a thing but in Counter Strike people use very low resolutions to enhance performance, have better vision and reduce mouse movement. We are talking about games where a few ms can make a difference.

While this is true pros still have very high performance pcs because there is an advantage to playing at 300 - 400 frames per second.

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#45

Post by kllrnohj »

duiker101 wrote: post #11

I think that the base concepts of this article are wrong. eSports is not saving PC gaming because the games require the best hardware. In fact competitve games have some of the lowest requirements possible. Riot(League of Legends) goes out of their way all the time to make sure that their game will work even on the most outdated computers and really none of the competitive games have the most astonishing graphic. For…

> I don't know if it's still a thing but in Counter Strike people use very low resolutions to enhance performance, have better vision and reduce mouse movement.

Not anymore. There are plenty of pros playing at 1920x1080 with all settings on high + MSAA. High-end video cards are common as a result (as the target is ~200-300fps on 144hz monitors)

I think the reasons for this are a combination of that's what this generation of pros grew up expecting AND the rise of twitch streaming. Better looking streams attract more viewers.

There have been some investigation of settings and high vs. low generally doesn't give you an advantage or disadvantage either way.

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#46

Post by goeric »

atom-morgan wrote: post #14
duiker101 wrote: post #11

I think that the base concepts of this article are wrong. eSports is not saving PC gaming because the games require the best hardware. In fact competitve games have some of the lowest requirements possible. Riot(League of Legends) goes out of their way all the time to make sure that their game will work even on the most outdated computers and really none of the competitive games have the most astonishing graphic. For…

> I don't know if it's still a thing but in Counter Strike people use very low resolutions to enhance performance, have better vision and reduce mouse movement. I can't say for sure with CS but I know it's definitely the case with StarCraft. I saw it firsthand when I was in Vegas for a competition and had the chance to spectate behind some of the competitors irl. All that I saw were on the lowest graphics settings.

Former professional Counter-Strike player here, can confirm. A lot of the top players still play on 1024x768 even on widescreen monitors (some have it stretched, some have black bars on the side). While I can't explain the technical reasons behind it, from experience I can definitely say the blocky nature of low-resolution gives you does feel like it's easier to get headshots. I always performed better at low resolutions, even with a gaming PC more-than-capable of running at 1080p 200FPS+.

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#47

Post by moistgorilla »

redml wrote: post #27

My biggest surprise is how this all runs on Microsoft's operating system and Microsoft does very little to nothing to facilitate this as a potential revenue stream. In fact they're just sitting by and watching as the biggest player, steam, is slowly taking their library off of windows and onto mac or linux.

Microsoft have the biggest IP that could turn into an esport (Halo) and all they would need to do is put it on PC and Xbox one for free, throw in cosmetic microtransaction ala CSGO and they would make billions. But they will never do it.

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#48

Post by tychuz »

Zikes wrote: post #15
yongelee wrote: post #5

should be titled: how STEAM is saving the PC industry.

Given their work with the Steam Link and Steam Controller, I think you have a valid point. Steam Link supports DualShock and XBox controllers, and can stream via network from a PC located elsewhere in the house, making PC a viable competitor in the "couch gaming" space that consoles have thus far dominated.

Erm. When you play Call of Duty on PS/xBox, you're playing with controller against other people with same controllers.

When you'll join a PC server with your steam controller, you will have 0 kills and 20 deaths, because everyone is playing with a mouse.

That is not fun.

Steam controller helps with, I don't know, 10% of the gaming - the single player. And if you're casual and single player is 100% of your games - hell, buy a Wii U, because PC has zero split screen games.

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#49

Post by kibwen » 

  > Defense of the Ancients 2 (1,262,612 daily players)
Curiously, "Dota 2" is not actually an abbreviation for "Defense of the Ancients 2", the full name of the game is just "Dota 2". Valve did this because they weren't capable of trademarking the term "Defense of the Ancients", whereas they were eventually able to procure the commercial trademark for "Dota" (which caused a stir in the greater community at the time, which had been using the initialism in a general capacity for ages).

Re: How eSports are saving the PC industry

#50

Post by moistgorilla »

ddorian43 wrote: post #28
eterm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter-strike global offensive is actually one of the fastest growing esports. It gets more monthly viewer hours than DOTA (outside of The International, DOTA doesn't get many viewers), although is still some way behind LoL. However, CSGO majors viewing figures went from ~150k to ~300k to ~1mil to ~1.2m for the last few majors, so it's growing really fast.

I think you get (random?) items in the game when you view these events in CSGO, so many people are viewing with multiple accounts.

I'm pulling numbers out of my ass but I would really be surprised if more than 100,000 of those viewers are duplicate accounts. To do the duplicate viewer thing you need to own multiple accounts with a copy of the game on each one.
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