Comment by vvanders | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vvanders | Hacker News Reader

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Pretty much.

Anyone who's written game netcode(either as a hobby or professionally) knows that you build the game design and game engine from the ground up to tolerate latency.

For action games most of the time it's all about building a game design where you're predicting(either via physical location or other player's actions), except in the few rare cases that do time-rewinding(most fighting games, some FPSes that combine both, most notably Counter-Strike). This is usually handled by dead-reckoning[1]

For large scale, low bandwidth games(AKA RTSes and the like where gamestate is deterministic) that's handled via lock-step[2]. The gamestate is 100% deterministic and all clients move together with a shared set of inputs in "lock step".

Both of these approaches can be tolerant to latencies up to ~600ms(back in the ole 28.8/56k days of '97 SubSpace[3] was doing ~300 players in one zone with a high skill curve and a robust netcode). They usually mask it with client side reactions that are then reconciled with the server in a robust way. If you're just dropping video frames over a network stack none of that is available to you no matter how fancy your FEC or other tricks are.

Somehow I've now got the urge to go dust off the Continuum client again and boot up SubSpace.

[1] https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131638/dead_reckoning...

[2] https://meseta.medium.com/netcode-concepts-part-3-lockstep-a...

[3] https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum...

While you are absolutely correct, I believe the target market for Stadia is more people like my parents, who used to play casual games 10 years ago and then got too busy. They cannot justify owning a console and purchasing $60 games. But they'd be easy to sell on a $5 monthly games on demand subscription.

They will be playing with bluetooth gamepads (5ms latency) on their TV (10-20ms latency) using Wifi (5-10ms latency), so the internet streaming delay of <10ms from an edge server will be barely noticeable.

For example, Stadia is featuring "Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris" which is a perfect game for high-latency unskilled casual play.

Oh yeah, I don't doubt there's a market for this but I don't think you see it take over the same way that say Netflix did for VoD.

(FWIW I heavily use Steam's streaming client so I'm pretty familiar with most of the failure modes, it doesn't work great for everything but is convenient when the game style and network performance overlap)

I thought one has to still buy/rent games on top of the $5/month. $5 is only the fee for renting “cloud hardware” - May be some games are included, but definitely not comparable to a Netflix for games. I guess it more like a Disney- ?

Stadia is free if you're happy with 1080p, and you purchase games on top. The pro subscription is around $10/month, but adds 4k res and a few new games every month.

But what benefit is there compared to playing a game on a phone or PC?

Look at how people use javascript for client side coding but go or rust for the back end -- the service provider pays for back end resources and they are always going to be niggardly when it comes to cpu, gpu, etc.

OT: thanks for the link to Subspace; played that a bunch in the old times; gonna try it again soon.

Latency is the most important thing. There's a reason high refresh monitors are loved by serious gamers.

I can deal with 1080p playing old ps2/3 games through an online service, or modern with the same resolution but high settings with snappy controls.

I cannot play a game with noticeable input lag whatsoever, even if it was at 4k HDR 144hz.

We're not talking about input or rendering latency here, networked games are designed to work such that even when you have 100-300ms of round-trip latency the objective of the game is setup in such a way that your success is based on "predicting" events or the server keeps all disparate time domains in memory and can time-rewind to resolve authoritative game state.

I know that technically it's a different problem.

But the prediction is exactly what makes it feel unresponsive. So the human perception is input lag, regardless of what causes that feeling.

The input lag causes both unresponsiveness and prediction. The former is obvious, a simple example for the latter: in RTS/MOBA (both rollback or lockstep netcode) the whole region around the opponent where he could be in the next tick becomes your target, the size of it depends on the latency and if RTT is big enough possible reactions become an additional factor.

by serious gamers

You'd think that "serious gamers" would obsess over the merits of games (mechanics, plot, level design, gameplay, etc), not the technical minutiae of framerates and input lag. That term always seemed odd to me.

If you're, say, playing a competitive FPS with a team (e.g. Counter Strike), you will obsess about game mechanics and latency and input lag, because after 10 hours proficiency you'll be able to notice if you're getting packet loss, if your spouse is using all the bandwidth and your crappy router with bufferbloat adds additional latency.

If the game is unpleasant to play because of input lag and the player cannot react to what is happening on screen because their response arrives half a second ir more too late, they'll have trouble appreciating all the other stuff.

Hardcore fans of media have always fawned over the technical aspects. We've seen it in photography, film-making, music, and now gaming.

I used that for lack of a better term.

Generally, I agree. But to me, input lag and performance does impact.

Like watching a movie cam rip with choppy audio. You can still admire the film, but it's not going to be a pleasant experience compared to watching it in the cinema.

> Latency is the most important thing. There's a reason high refresh monitors are loved by serious gamers. The biggest improvement with 144Hz is motion clarity, but you can cheese it with tricks like strobing or Black Frame Insertation (BFI). I keep a CRT around for this reason.

> I cannot play a game with noticeable input lag whatsoever, even if it was at 4k HDR 144hz. People are surprisingly tolerant of different latencies. Many Vsync implementations end up with 4-5 frames of latency, which ends up around 75ms, and consoles that run at 30FPS (or 20 FPS like some N64 classics!) can be in excess of 100ms. If the game is designed around it, people will adapt (just like people adapt to 24fps movies).

I agree though, if you want games to feel like your is physically connected, 10-20ms is what most folks in the VR industry are targeting.

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