Technical solution to eliminate desync in single-player sessions

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ephetat wrote:

I too wonder about the self-confidence that outright brushes off one of the most verbose and demonstratively knowledgeable developers of the game as not fully understanding how the very same game works.

Yeah, not to mention Mark is a programmer. One of the main programmers if I'm not mistaken. I don't know a lot about programming, but what I do know is that everything within a system is usually very dependent on the way the rest of the system works. I wonder if qwave really knows entirely how the game code is written, or to what degree at least. Who knows? I don't.

I can write math proofs, does that count for anything? ...Sadly, no, it's fucking useless.

Oh for crying out loud ! Just fix this desync issue already, everyone is experiencing it, we're not making it up. It's just PoE, no other games ever did something like this, at least not for me, and I'm playing online games for a really long time now. Please...

Just because Mark is programmer does not make him an authority on network synchronization. He is speaking as a product owner, he's exhibited and flat-out said that he is not an expert on the matter.

He specifically stated:
"I am not an expert in the field, and my contributions are limited to stuff where skills operate differently on client and server because of bugs"

I myself am no expert in game development, but I am an expert in software architecture and development.


1. It's obvious that the client is not performing these calculations because the hit doesn't register until the packet is received from the server. This is proof that the client is not using a deterministic seed.

2. Fixing bugs with skills will not resolve de-syncing. You can desync without even using skills.

3. Any professional developer in the industry will support the proposal ive made. It is a proven architecture that online games are built upon. I did not invent any of this myself, but I have been writing network software for the past 12 years and have a strong understanding of what it takes to build distributed cloud networks and low-latency solutions.

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qwave wrote:

Just because Mark is programmer does not make him an authority on network synchronization. He is speaking as a product owner, he's exhibited and flat-out said that he is not an expert on the matter.

He specifically stated:
"I am not an expert in the field, and my contributions are limited to stuff where skills operate differently on client and server because of bugs"

I am no expert in game development, but I am an expert in software architecture and development.


1. It's obvious that the client is not performing these calculations because the hit doesn't register until the packet is received from the server. This is proof that the client is not using a deterministic seed.

2. Fixing bugs with skills will not resolve de-syncing. You can desync without even using skills.

3. Any professional developer in the industry will support the proposal ive made. It is a proven architecture that online games are built upon. I did not invent any of this myself, but I have been writing network software for the past 12 years and have a strong understanding of what it takes to build distributed cloud networks and low-latency solutions.

Just LOL at everything you have said recently. It is all right to admit that you are wrong at times. Sometimes, you have correct assumptions, but some are wrong too. You cannot directly counter what Mark is saying because he knows a lot more about the game. You are in the dark.

This has given me a great deal of laughter for one evening. So for that, I thank you Qwave. Side note: If you want your suggestions taken seriously, don't act like an elitist and don't talk down to people that can help you.

Hmmm. Qwave is clearly not retarded. The only reasoning which makes sense to me is that he is pumping Mark for more information on the internal workings of the network code. I can see no other sane alternative as to why someone would behave in such a manner.

Maybe OP should have not called the client a 'dumb terminal' despite of the best effort of developers to make one of the best game i ever played. The client indeed perform very well in handling lag, but all its 'calculations' may be invalidated because of desync and because the server says "sorry, you actually was in the next room, your fireball does not hit the monster, the monster in the next room instead hit you".

Besides the 30+ page of the thread, i think the main problem is that GGG should have designed the game in a completely different way: with such a complexity a deterministic framework is mandatory. This is the core of this thread.

From a technical poin of view, i'm also very surprised that in the sync-manifesto there is no description of determinism, even if it is a very used paradigma in online games.

Mark_GGG, perhaps you could have someone like Chris create a sensible response to my proposal? I love your game and respect your team, but I am very disappointed with the desyncing issues, especially when there are obvious and proven solutions that are documented and well known in the game industry.


HellGauss: "dumb terminal" is not an offensive or derogatory term. It is an industry term to describe the attributes of a software application. There is nothing wrong with a 'dumb terminal' in general, but the PoE game client should be a smart terminal with deterministic synchronization - like virtually every other online game out there. Traditional dumb terminals are typically used on embedded devices because the processors do not have the capability to produce calculations on their own. Obviously our home PCs are capable of calculating a critical hit.


SkyCore: Mark and the team have not provided any information that demonstrates an understanding of modern network architecture. Chris' manifesto (from when I last read it) demonstrates an oldschool approach that does not take advantage of modern synchronization techniques and determinism. In fact, if I recall correctly, they did not even use timestamps to provide interpolation or prediction.

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qwave wrote:

Stuff I don't understand

Maybe you can shed some light on some of the finer details for me, all this talk of deterministic seeds has me confused.

Questions:
a) What is in this 'snapshot', what kind of information does it contain? A seed of some sort? A data structure containing the current game state of every object in the area?

b) How many of these snapshots will be taken and how often?

c) Will the server be responsible for 'calculating' what happens between each snapshot, or just verify the the snapshot could happen.

d) Given that fake snapshots could be added at anytime in the process, would each one need to be verified against the one before it, and before it, and before it... Given an hour or more in a single instance, possibly millions of snapshots, would it not be akin to solving every possible chess move after the first move?

e) What about storage considerations? Not everyone, dare I say less then a few percent of people finish an area in under a few minutes, I personally enjoy clearing entire areas (bit of a loot junky), would this not affect the amount needed to be stored (I assume on the servers) while I play?

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SkyCore wrote:

Hmmm. Qwave is clearly not retarded. The only reasoning which makes sense to me is that he is pumping Mark for more information on the internal workings of the network code. I can see no other sane alternative as to why someone would behave in such a manner.

I can. Qwave is just a younger version of me, except I gather he actually graduated college.

Oh, to be both educated and stupid.