Technical solution to eliminate desync in single-player sessions

"

qwave wrote:

"

Whether or not you believe it's enough to impact the economy or gameplay is irrelevant.

Sorry, but the current desync situation is not safe. Which would you prefer?

1. Losing your level 90 because your game desynced and teleported you into a room full of mobs.

2. Another player that you don't know survived an encounter that should have killed him because he used a hack.

What I prefer is also irrelevant.

And desync is safe. It has no hacking or cheating vulnerabilities.

What is relevant is the bounds GGG has set for their game, namely no cheating and no hacking.

Your 'solution' is not within those bounds and is therefore utterly pointless.

"

Hell, I just lost my Nemesis character to a teleporting map Brutus (although the desync was obvious and the death was predictable, so I still blame myself for the death).

There's no reason to blame yourself for a death that is caused by the game's network code. I see this way too frequently. We've desensetized ourselves to how a game is actually supposed to feel. You SHOULD be able to kite mobs around the game's architecture, what else is the point of having walls, doors, pillars, etc?

"

qwave wrote:

"

I hope to fuck that what the client is actually sending the server is just simply "skill used at location x,y." Really, the only thing the server needs to know is player commands, and the more purely that information is sent to the server, the better

The client tries to send a representation of the input, but this is not always possible.

For example, when you run in a circle, the client doesn't send a packet that represents the circle. It sends segments of your path, which ends up being a square or even a straight line. This is what causes de-sync.

The much more sane thing would be for the client to say "He just clicked there! Better immediately send a packet with the command to the server." For every click. I don't see any way what you're describing could possibly happen until the client waited to send packets.

Quite frankly, I think you're talking out your ass.

Gobla, the proposal has extremely limited 'hacking' potential. Yes, you can potentially 'undo' the last 750 milliseconds of gameplay.

- This does not allow hackers to get more items/loot.
- This does not allow hackers to do more damage.
- This does not allow hackers to be immune to damage.

As far as im concerned, it has extremely minor implications. Currently, the game can randomly kill you - the game's creatures are the hackers. They have more of an impact on the playability of the game, and it needs to be fixed.

Extremely limited is not none.

GGG has repeatedly stated their intention for a game with no hacking potential.

Come back when you have a solution with no hacking potential at all.

"

qwave wrote:

"

Hell, I just lost my Nemesis character to a teleporting map Brutus (although the desync was obvious and the death was predictable, so I still blame myself for the death).

There's no reason to blame yourself for a death that is caused by the game's network code. I see this way too frequently. We've desensetized ourselves to how a game is actually supposed to feel. You SHOULD be able to kite mobs around the game's architecture, what else is the point of having walls, doors, pillars, etc?

By obvious I mean it had been persisting for some time, and I was facing a very dangerous — and skippable — map boss, and I continued anyway. I should point out I was full Acrobatics with zero Armour, and additionally I forgot to activate my high-level Arctic Armour for no good reason other than pure play error. And even then I wasn't quite one-shot by the ground slam, although I got a follow-up jab to KO me shortly thereafter. I'm pretty sure I would have lived with AA up.

The point being: unsync'd monsters is something which currently happens. Often. I see monsters desync-teleport frequently enough on weekends when traffic is high. The difference is that, with UDP, stale packets wouldn't waste network resources getting resent when they're too old to make any difference, freeing up network resources for more consistent broadcast of monster positions.

"

The much more sane thing would be for the client to say "He just clicked there! Better immediately send a packet with the command to the server." I don't see any way what you're describing could possibly happen until the client waited to send packets.

Hold your mouse button down and move around in a circle. You are not clicking multiple times, your character is moving around following your cursor. The game client cannot send a packet which represents every pixel that you've moved to. It sends packets in segments and the server uses interpolation to guess your exact path.

"

METE wrote:

I remember the S2 devs talking about Heroes of Newerth, the game was made with something like this desync thing... The server is always assuming that you are lagging and they deal with it in some way, I played at least 1000+ HoN games and I never feel the desync, the game response is faster then any other moba and sometimes I played with 400ms (lagging but still playable).

Anyway, I still have faith in GGG devs.

True, but HoN skills had cooldowns. Most PoE Skills don't.

"

Come back when you have a solution with no hacking potential at all.

If they want to design a game with no room for client-side trust, then we can face game-crippling desync for the rest of our PoE lives. =)

Nothing will ever change in the 'desync' department unless they start to adopt these methods.

"

qwave wrote:

"

The much more sane thing would be for the client to say "He just clicked there! Better immediately send a packet with the command to the server." I don't see any way what you're describing could possibly happen until the client waited to send packets.

Hold your mouse button down and move around in a circle. You are not clicking multiple times, your character is moving around following your cursor. The game client cannot send a packet which represents every pixel that you've moved to. It sends packets in segments and the server uses interpolation to guess your exact path.

The only time I ever hold down the mouse button in PoE is when I'm namelocking a monster, and even then I rarely move the cursor very much as I do (no doubt some, because I'm human, but you get the idea).

Frankly, I believe the client should treat this as a series of individual clicks with a resend rate of one every x milliseconds, where x is some constant.