Yeah honestly, I bought Tarkov second-hand for $8 and even then I felt like I was getting ripped off.
It’s probably not news to anyone but the game has extremely lax anti-cheat controls.
As for why people would cheat in an online game, it always seems obvious from a psychological standpoint, but the cheats for Tarkov are so egregious they’re like full blown developer offline DEBUG TOOLS.
I don’t mean “oh no, aim assistance, and they can see you through walls” – the cheat tools are hooking into features of the GAME ENGINE ITSELF, allowing players to see:
<span style="color:#323232;">PlayerName, Current HP, Current Level, Full inventory contents, currently equipped weapon, position, heading, estimated value of inventory, estimated value of your account, age of account creation, and so on.
</span>
They can also: Teleport, FLY, increase or decrease their run speed, jump height, and so on.
The cheaters are basically running around with admin privileges in the game, and the developers don’t give a flying fuck. It’s like GTA5 levels of cheating.
Why would anyone play such a game, much less pay $150 to be abused by people? You can slam your dick in a car door for a lot less.
Whats sad is that people keep wanting more client-side anticheat to fix this, when the real answer is server-side anticheat and changing the engine to stop being so leaky with that much information.
lol raycasting isn’t optimized for server side deployment, it would increase the poly count of the mesh tenfold, which would in turn increase average ping and fps. Couple that with the client side rendering problem and I don’t know anything about development just kidding
Your suggesting the server maintain a real time render for every single player and somehow manage to get the data back to them in less than 17ms so that they don’t have empty frames that suddenly become people?
Because that’s a ludicrous requirement in terms of latency (ping is totally reasonable at any value under 100ms) and server capacity.
Because your solution sounds like it would cause popping constantly and be a major burden on the server, which is already the largest overhead on a released game.
By rendering people, as in sending data about an object that should be rendered, in a few pixels before they would be visible. And not at all on distances, without a scope (as they would not be visible). Footsteps etc. could be represented by two noise levels precalculated by the servers very roughly, so you can tell someone is there behind you, but a cheat could not determine where exactly.
You want a server to determine if a player should be visible (ie render each player’s perspective) and then get that back to them right before someone walks around the corner? With latency you’d need to render people in at least 200ms before they appear… Which is still plenty of time for a hacker to flick to them and kill them.
True that, but I imagine such sudden flicking to seemingly random positions to be much more obvious than if the hacker had 10 seconds to see the player, tactically preaiming a corner pretending to hold an angle to then be lucky and hit a shot. Would be harder on games with smaller maps, CS like, as holding angles would be much more common than in open worlds - eg. Tarkov.
If the trajectory and speed says either the client or another player will cross a wall soon where the player sees them THEN it could send the data to the client. You need some tolerance for ping up to maybe 200ms but that’s it. Wallhacks could give you at most a flash of a couple specific people.
You need to account for every gap in the wall, nook and cranny and peephole for these sightlines. You’d have to bake so much detail into every calculation server side that it would effectively be rendering the entire map to host a single game.
It could be a client-side check with verification on the server. Basically transmitting which places are in view. Ray casting like the other person said. Not raytracing which is much more computationally intensive. A server side check basically so that the client can’t just say they’re looking around every corner at once.
Why not? More computationally intensive things are done to calculate lighting in a lot of modern games as I alluded to. Yes it would increase the load on your CPU but that’s less of a problem nowadays with higher core counts and clock speeds and it’s not like modern anticheats don’t steal some CPU cycles already. I think you underestimate the power of modern computers. I’m not trying to be condescending here but it is worth remembering that gigahertz means BILLIONS of calculations per second.
We’re only talking in theoreticals right now anyways, it is entirely possible that a game studio has tried this and it hasn’t worked, I just don’t put a lot of faith in modern game companies.
You cannot break the speed of light with computational effort.
You’re saying that you want to have a round trip from client to server and back happen in-between frames.
You cannot do that. Period. You will not ever have latencies that low.
Even if you frame lock it at 60fps that means you’re calculating views, sending the data up the tube, checking it on the server, responding back with all the data about the new character that should appear and then rendering the new guy within 17ms.
So you’re going to take all the places a character could be in the next 200ms, do Ray casting on all of them and send that data to the server to check every 17ms?
While the server also does that for 15 other players at the same time.
Do you know what algorithmic complexity is? Big O notation? If so - that’s a n³ * 15m³ problem space that you’re expanding out across 200ms every 17ms, where n is player locations possible in x/y/z and m is the other players locations. Physics collisions are usually the biggest drain on a computer’s cycles in game and in the worst case that’s n² complexity.
There are many ways of doing this. I know the source engine uses visboxes, which are calculated once at map compile time. It takes a while to compile, but it means that clients can use the pre-compiled data to calculate parts of the map that are visible and the server can use them to determine what the player can see at a given time. I’m not sure whether it does that or not, but it would make sense to use that data.
You constantly have to render people in when they can’t be seen but will soon be seen. Which also means instead of keeping track of just locations the server needs to render the scene in sufficient detail as to determine sightlines.
Usually games just do this by sending info to clients of where everyone is and letting the clients render people in when the client determines that the sightline isn’t interrupted.
Some games will just not send the positions until they’re within a certain range of each other, but I’m a realistic game like tark you’d need several kilometers of info in case someone scoped in.
If you don’t do this correctly it leads to characters popping into existence from thin air
You could use things like ray tracing to determine if one player can be seen by another on the serverside and only send packages when they can see.
But to resource heavy to do that.
Edit: Thinking about it, you simply have to render the whole map with all players server side and based on that determine which players can see each other and based on that send the information to the clients.
You do see why that’s a serious issue right? Before the Server did nothing more than maintain a list of x,y,z coordinates of player positions. Now it’s rendering the entire game space and doing 3d calculations.
That’s several orders of magnitude more complex and costly.
Like, this is what leads to invasive client-side anti-cheat. Which also happens to be one of the main blockers for OS portability.
But if you make it so that the server has to constantly validate the game state, you get terrible lag.
You really have to design your game well to deter cheaters. And you have to empower server moderators to ban cheaters. This sorta implies releasing the servers so that communities can run their own instances, because these studios don’t have the resources to handle moderation themselves.
the validation shouldn’t cause too much lag since game needs to sync up the game states anyways, which is an operation that is inherently way more expensive than any validation anyways (since each frame of the following game states need to adhere to the game rules anyways, there’s already inherently some form of validation). It’s more about not trusting everything the client says the game state should be.
Cheaters are a big problem in this game. To experience the cool parts of the game without all the bulshit, there is still SPT-AKI for playing solo and also the SIT mod for PvE multiplayer coop.
I haven’t been having any major problems except for occasional framerate stuttering, but then I don’t use that many mods.
My only real complaint is that there’s really no new story content, it’s just a couple of new locations (Enclave checkpoints like FO3) some new armor and weapon types, and a handful of quests that are pretty much radiant quests with a coat of Enclave paint. Considering the download was like 10GB I was expecting more. If Google is telling me the truth, that’s bigger than all the other DLC combined.
The title and the article are overdramaric. On PS5 it’s working great. The issue looks to be messing with mods (which had been expected), not breaking the actual game.
I’m not sure what exactly is the point of installing this update on PC other than a questline and some cosmetics? As this update was mainly targeted for consoles to increase framerate and resolution - which it did better than I expected - and PC players could already do that without the update.
Works fine for me on Xbox Series X with the exception of a couple of crashes over the course of 3-5 hours. The only issue I see is this should have been an optional upgrade to give the modders time to fix their stuff.
I only experienced framerate drop in the prologue (in the house in 2077 and in the Vault) and 1 crash during it. Once I was out in the open world, tha game has been flawless.
The only thing I expected from this update was 60 FPS and - if it’s not too much to ask - higher resolution. They delivered that and more. Game runs smoothly and looks much better than I expected, more detailed (and much better than FO76). They also threw in some new content which I haven’t discovered yet so cannot vouch for it. The Enclave paint look great on everything though.
And remember, this is a free update. So I think people are going a bit too hard on Bethesda this time (I know it’s the trendy thing to do). They pissed me off when they delayed the update just to sync it with the show. But looking back from their perspective it was probably the right call since everyone is now more hyped to play the games.
EDIT: And exactly as you say - modders just need some time to update their mods. But you cannot expect Bethesda to have their update checked for compatibility with every mod out there.
The $150 isn’t for the new game mode. People that paid $150 were told they’d get all DLC. The devs are saying this isn’t DLC and these folks will get it for free once the game is out of early access. People that paid $250 can play this now. People that paid any more will have some level of discount to purchase access to this mode.
I think $55 total? $35 for my initial package and I spent $20 a few years ago for a cooler starter ship because I was enjoying the game and wanted to support development. I think the $35 package is now $45 – I bought in on the original Kickstarter – but that price gets you full access to the game and all the ships/hangars/etc… you just don’t start with them, and instead have to earn in-game currency to buy (or rent) them. I wouldn’t want a super expensive starter ship anyway, it skips too much of the early game progression.
My brother plays games with in app purchases and he claims to know people who have spent $100K on their profiles. I think building a fire using the cash would be less wasteful
I play hearthstone and spend more than that every 3 months to get a complete set of the expansion (well actually now that I think about it, it’s about $150 every three months or so).
I play a lot so my value to time ratio is pretty good but yeah…I don’t really buy any other games.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne