Comment by hesdeadjim | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hesdeadjim | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I remember having to schedule a 780Kb download overnight and hoping no one picked the phone up. Or years later having to download shows in advance (illegally because they weren’t available) because streaming wasn’t possible.

Now I casually (and legally) boot up any show I feel like within seconds at HD resolutions. I love thinking about the sheer amount of data that is traversing around the internet now. And it’s more fun to imagine what becomes possible when you bump up another order of magnitude or two.

In games for instance, a significant limiting factor for implementing large player counts in fast-paced multiplayer come down to bandwidth. The amount needed, for the most part, scales linearly per-player as the player count increases. Add more bandwidth (and some more CPU power) and games can evolve entirely new experiences.

The battle royale games like PUBG are a great example, but due to bandwidth issues and CPU usage the server tick rate is much slower than normal fast-paced games (20hz vs 60hz) and therefore the experience suffers quite a bit.

Multiplayer gaming has more issues with latency than a lack of raw bandwidth.

Not necessarily, depending on how the game is implemented a player with bad ping can be the only one who suffers the majority of the effects of their bad connection.

I am currently working with this tech:

https://www.photonengine.com/en-US/Quantum

And it does deliver on their promises, impressive stuff.

This looks neat, think it'd do well with upcoming projects like Star Citizen from CIG? Physics sims have to be limited dramatically atm.

Latency is usually from bandwidth being queued somewhere along the path

60hz even is low today by competitive standards for FPS games. 128 is nice, it should be a minimum.

I don't think there's a regular FPS game that does 60Hz. That's usually reserved for the private servers, tournaments.

This guy does a lot of game network analysis of the most popular FPS games:

https://www.youtube.com/user/xFPxAUTh0r1ty/videos

Most games are 60+t these days, the outliers being PUBG and Fortnite. Competitive CS:GO is the major one pushing 128t, and it's very noticeable at high levels of play. I have lost many firefights due to the weird interp that R6: Siege has, that simply don't exist at 128 CS fights.

TF2 has this issue where people can change their interp in a certain fashion that allowed hitscan guns to have a broader headshot range. I'm not sure if it still has it, I haven't played TF2 competitively since 2012. Looking at R6, nothing ever seems to line up properly between two clients for pixel-peeking, fast swings, or slow peeks alike. Something feels off about it compared to other shooters, but I can't pinpoint it. It feels like it's interp as it mimics the issues other games had related to interp.

For reference, I don't want to seem like some random person who just does badly and blames it on networking mechanics, I'm diamond in siege, A+ in ESEA and global in mm, held top 10 on the leaderboard in PUBG. (It also does feel nice to be able to say that sometimes, even on a technical site like this.)

I've seen his videos a lot. Also Escape from Tarkov, if you see in his videos he has listed at 93hz. In reality, the game has horrible issues that cause clients to experience desync, allowing delays nearing 1 SECOND in reality.

Tarkov used to have an issue where if you repeatedly opened and closed specific doors on some maps, it would create desync that was ever-growing. You could sometimes end up dying 5 minutes in the 'future,' while your client is 5 minutes out of date. It doesn't happen anymore thankfully. The game is plagued with other issues though.

I think you mean 128Hz as most games have settled on around 60Hz for any sort of competitive FPS game play. As per the person you linked, Rainbow 6 Siege, Battlefield 1(and 4/Hardline, presumably), CS:GO, Overwatch, CoD: WW2, and Quake Champions are all at least 60Hz for the client and server, while Quake Champions is 144Hz for the client. The only game I can think that uses 128Hz for both the client and server is dedicated servers or private matchmaking clients for CS:GO, and the game using less than 60Hz for the server are usually smaller games or battle royale games like PUBG and Fortnite.

CS:GO ESEA or FACEIT are always 128t. While in CS you don't see a lot of the issues at 60t, you do find them occasionally in high level play. I wonder if the same is true for R6: Siege, in which I feel interp is the cause of a lot of my deaths. The desync in Siege is absolutely insane, and I've lost many fights that were round or game changing to it at diamond. Even PUBG feels more responsive at 20t (the same tickrate as Minecraft, I like to note.) other than the occasional fight that ends when you kill someone as a bullet hits you, registering the blood splatter for you while you take no damage.

Meanwhile the batte Royale games are throwing that all out the window. Epics engine is struggling to maintain 20Hz on both PUBG and Fortnite though seems they are making advancements.

Often it’s only on LAN games for tourneys where the tick rate is that high. With internet latency or bandwidth requirements at that rate you are going to start dropping more and more packets and suffer from potentially more client side mispredictions.

Packet loss is usually very low. 1% and the game will most likely be unplayable.

Sending twice as many packets and losing 1% of them should be playable.

Maybe if you send some packets twice. Otherwise no. Packet loss is deadly.

I would go so far as to say that netcode for an FPS is objectively wrong if it's not sending data in a redundant form that can tolerate lost packets.

Tolerate yes, but it will still have an impact. In case of an online shooter, resending it will cost an additional RTT. If that resend is even happening, the next packet will make the dropped one obsolete.

Resends in an FPS are for dire scenarios, not 1% loss. 1% packet loss can be easily obsoleted and compensated, and the general performance of having 126/128 packets can be better than 60/60.

It's not frequent that I experience much loss when playing 128t servers. Mostly zero, very occasionally 1%. I wouldn't be paying monthly for it if I knew it to happen frequently.

My biggest gripe with ESEA is that I cannot have Hyper-V enabled on the OS that I am playing from.

Bandwidth is not the issue in PUBG.

Yeah exactly... while higher bandwidth may open the door for some new things in games... I think it's possible there is not a single game out there that really needs even as much bandwidth as a single HD video stream. The limiting factor is really latency and jitter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com