Fixing the Internet for Games • Hacker News Board

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#71

Post by gafferongames » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:13 PM UTC

kingosticks wrote: post #58

tschwimmer wrote: post #2

This was an awesome write up. The most interesting thing for me was learning that bottlenecks are not on the edge, but across the backbone because T1 carriers are optimizing for low cost, not low latency.

The thing I'm still a bit confused about is: is this a limitation with how their networks fundamentally work, or an artefact of my product choice when I buy a relatively cheap home Internet service? i.e. if I want a specialist low-latency and low-jitter link, could I not just pay for those benefits by purchasing a business-grade service? Or is there no distinction once the data gets onto a peered-network? Or is the i…

We are seeing players with Google Fiber get 100ms improvements. It’s not bad ISPs, it’s poor routing decisions and these are pretty much universal.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#72

Post by gafferongames » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:14 PM UTC

kaoD wrote: post #63

simonsays2 wrote: post #57

This sort of stuff has been around for a while, it helps some, but realistically your game needs to be designed from the ground up with latency and stutter in mind. If you do this, you wont need the complexity and expense of this sort of thing. First you need client side prediction and smoothing. Next, you must design your game so it follows certain very strict rules about player interaction. These rules allow the pl…

Are you teaching game networking to Glenn Fiedler? You probably learnt it from him, or someone who read his articles! Now seriously: client side prediction is not magic and it always introduces its own problems, like getting killed after getting into cover (especially in low TTK shooters) or the opposite: bullets not registering when if they hit in your screen. Client side prediction is sleight of hand. It will never…

Sure you can client side predict, but since the real game lives on the server, you want the minimal latency to that server so you see the most up to date version of what’s really happening, and your actions take effect as quickly as possible. You still want the lowest latency here.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#73

Post by gafferongames » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:16 PM UTC

gsich wrote: post #54

Animats wrote: post #49

Games need some low latency data, but not much. Player actions, character movement, and maybe bullets need low latency. Asset downloading does not. If you had a dial up modem running over a non-packet phone network, and didn't overload the buffering, you'd have better latency than the Internet. Many games make this distinction already. The latency-critical stuff goes over UDP, and it's limited to data where a missing…

Mostly it's just UDP with some TCP like reliable transfer built on top of it.

This is correct. Most FPS game protocols are 90%+ unreliable UDP acting as a carrier wave for a very small subset of reliable/ordered data. The key here is to get this unreliable time series data across with the lowest latency and the greatest consistency (least jitter), and packet loss. That’s what we do at Network Next.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#74

Post by gafferongames » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:17 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #46

gafferongames wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Route shaders select the best route out of multiple ones available. Right now they could be used to for example, specify basic things like: acceptable latency (eg. I don’t want to pay to optimize a player’s session from 20ms down to 19ms, 20 is good enough), minimum improvement vs. public internet before a session takes network next (eg. 5ms improvement or greater), and of course maximum price for the bid. If we don’…

The really interesting thing I see for this is a possible other route for game revenue in the future. Instead of paying up front (traditional) pricing or advertising, or cosmetic (or not so cosmetic) in game purchases, you could have two tiers, free and optimized latency for a cost. Or some combination. Cosmetic in-game purchases aren't necessarily bad, but the amount my son has spent and tries to continue to spend (…

Our customer is the game developer not the player. They are free to pass the cost on to the player if they wish, but I think it’s much more enlightened to simply sponsor your player’s connection and help them have as much fun as possible. When players are having fun, they like your game more, stick around, tell their friends, and spend more in your store.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#75

Post by gafferongames » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:18 PM UTC

mkj wrote: post #37

This could be useful for long-distance remote desktop and SSH too. Curious how to build on top of it for diverse apps though (use it as a VPN somehow?)

Right now we are an SDK that embeds in the client, server and backend for applications. It is open source too (BSD license), but not yet publicly released. Will be released soon, I look forward to seeing what people do with it, outside of games.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#76

Post by gafferongames » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:20 PM UTC

petermcneeley wrote: post #34

The primary issue with the internet networking is the lack of Quality of Service (QoS) controls at the application layer.

This is true, but without a marketplace and somebody paying, how can we tell whether the QoS requests are legitimate? I mean, “yeah, my traffic is always real-time priority”. People just will cheat it... so Network Next is a way of doing this, while saying, OK, for the truly real-time traffic, applications are willing to sponsor it. Since it’s paid, it won’t be exploited.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#77

Post by gafferongames » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:26 PM UTC

peteretep wrote: post #50

Where can I read more about League of Legends private internet as mentioned in the article?

https://technology.riotgames.com/news/fixing-internet-real-t...

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#78

Post by ucaetano » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:28 PM UTC

gafferongames wrote: post #70

ucaetano wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to the datacenters, just to the POPs or edge nodes, after that, it is all private networks. And, afaik, the distance to the closest pop or edge node is a small share of the total distance to the datacenters.

We are measuring improvement to google’s own data centers.

No, you're measuring improvement to the POP where you peer with Google.

Unless you're telling me that Google is giving you access to its private networks all the way to the datacenters, which I'd find hard to believe.

Between you and a Google Datacenter, most of the path is through Google's private networks.

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#79

Post by gafferongames » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:28 PM UTC

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #19

I'm just glad to see someone implements a real time bidding market without dropping the word blockchain. I really like the idea of it.

I really hate blockchain :)

Re: Fixing the Internet for Games

#80

Post by gafferongames » Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC

gafferongames wrote: post #73

gsich wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly it's just UDP with some TCP like reliable transfer built on top of it.

This is correct. Most FPS game protocols are 90%+ unreliable UDP acting as a carrier wave for a very small subset of reliable/ordered data. The key here is to get this unreliable time series data across with the lowest latency and the greatest consistency (least jitter), and packet loss. That’s what we do at Network Next.

And also, we only accelerate the part of the game that needs the low latency. Game downloads and everything else... ehh, that’s a solved problem for a while now. We accelerate only the game traffic between client and server!