sp3ctr4l

I guess people don't know this anymore but uh...

A server browser, where you can pick between official servers, and private, community servers... with their own mods or game modes or AC on or off...

This was the norm for multiplayer fps games for like 20 to 30 years.

Only fairly recently has everything become 'streamlined' by removing the server browser, just giving you access to various matchmaking queues, and oh AC is kernel level now also, even though it doesn't fucking work, as a quick websearch can find you...

Hacks and trainers that only work on Windows, that defeat all kinds of KnlAC, all the time.

Nobody makes or sells game hack trainer suites that properly work on linux, ironically you yourself would have to hack the hack to even try.

Or, you just basically plug your mouse/kb into a tiny raspberry pi type device that functionally middlemans your own pc, and the hacks run on that thing.

The only AC that could possibly catch that is a rigorous and well implemented serverside AC....

But netcode is too hard for modern devs, who just subcontract out as much work of all kinds as possible these days.

Or I guess you can uh, mandate that in addition to full access to your kernel, you also have to consent to having 3 webcams in your gaming zone at all times, or a fucking manual, in person contraband check/gaming zone inspection.

... and yes, if you get hired to dev a game and then fired after release, come on now, functionally, you are a contract worker, no matter whatever insane nonsense legal classification your job technically is.

I am so fucking tired of this discussion.

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

Go, go, look through this list.

With the exception of a few proprietary ACs, or just ancient ones...

Nearly every single AC has at least one, if not multiple, or even many instances of properly working on a game that runs on linux.

EAC and BattlEye have supported linux for 3 years now.

3 years.

Gonna be 4 in a couple months.

Its part of the liscensing that game studios pay for, they offer and support making builds that work on linux via Proton, offer to help game devs with any tweaks they may need to make.

This is, and has for years, just been as simple as management is telling devs not to bother with the fairly minor effort it would take to do this, at least with EAC and BattleEye.

AC works on linux, it doesn't need to finger fuck your kernel to do so.

Its just that most game developers (lets be real, their upper management / C Suite), only want to fully go in raw, or not at all, and Windows is giving it up on the reg.

Monologue internal narration to the audience.

I have worked in gaming, and I've already told you that, but you already said you don't read things that I write, so yeah.

And, yes, I am at this point being a dick, to you, on the internet, for sport, because you are so entirely disingenuous and full of shit that it is quite amusing to me.

I don't actually give a shit whether or not you in particular agree with me or like me or believe me... because its been clear from the get go that you are both woefully uninformed but also totally stubborn, obstinant and set in your opinion, and you aren't capable of discussing the technicals you claim to understand.

The other actual experienced software / server engineer in this thread also tried to reason with you, more politely, and you just took a rhetorical approach of overwhelming them with questions... so I am now overwhelming you with relevant info, and you don't like it.

You're now just mirroring some of my latest rhetorical approach back at me, albeit in very, very condensed form... you're not even clever at debating.

You are a power user that thinks themself to be a seasoned senior software engineer, but you're not.

But hey, since you asked me to stop, I will stop humiliating you now.

Toodles!

Oh god yes dear fucking lord.

I would say its astounding they haven't been banned, but they have a loooot of money, so, no, that makes perfect sense.

Yeah Scientology, is the most direct analogue to the insano cult shit in East Asia.

They stalk people, have probably assasinated people, imprison people in their little nonsense navy, buy entire city neighborhoods and all the local municipal politicians... got the insane alien religion, the fucking e meter cans things... entire thing is basically a massively gaslighty, manipulative and dangerous cult.

Got it, so we're allowed to post news articles on .world discussing facsists advocating for and directly enacting brutal violence... at a grand scale...

But unspecified, indirect references to the concept of violent resistance, self-defense, on a similar scale... nah, users can't do that.

You do not see a hypocrisy here?

A blatant and glaring double standard?

Well ayy, you beat me to making a PTB post on this, but uh yeah...

.world?

collaborating with and covering for fascists?

The 'Death Breathers' thing is a primary plot point /story device / world mechanic of the ludicrous, over the top, MARS ATTACKS! from 1996.

Yep.

People not from or really familiar with Japan and also South Korea... when you tell them that actually, weird ass insano religious cults actually fund and drive a very substantial amount of politics and prominent political personalities...

People often think you are being some kind of racist when you say that.

Nope. This is just actually true, to an extent that is often absurd/incomprehensible to many in the Anglosphere.

Which... is kinda weird, because, look at the US.

The Republican party, as in elected officials, is ... majority composed of outright christian nationalist theocrats? Supermajority?

That are functionally a death cult that is actively trying to bring about their version of the apocalypse, at a geopolitical scale, so that Jesus can rapture them all away.

... What are the Mormons? Oh, right, an extremist domestic terrorist religious cult, founded by a locally infamous conman, that just barely managed to not get snuffed out in its infancy of many clashes with Federal Forces and state militias, that's just managed to get a hell of a lot better at PR... while also continuing to evangelize and amass money and political power, and gaslight the fuck out if its adherents as to its actual history.

It really shouldn't be shocking at all that massive, culty religious organizations with opaque external financial reporting standards and essentially always also massive tax breaks/exceptions... do in fact worm their way into having massive power over the political apparatus.

To preface, I support SKG. I'm not at all disagreeing with the movement, and I understand the point of SKG is to be setting a standard going forward that will force developers to stop doing this bullshit. My argument wasn't that SKG is bad.

I hear you, and I understand.

My argument was that the developers arguing against the movement are getting hung up on and bikeshedding about multiplayer and live service games. I was trying look at it from the perspective of a developer and explain that we (consumers) understand that it's not reasonable (for various reasons) to demand that they release the entire stack of backend services used by a game.

I mean, generally, in many modern scenarios, yes, I broadly agree, releasing the entire stack of how many things are currently done, just as is, would be basically legally impossible, which I why I kept trying to stress the whole idea is ... not to do or demand that, for currently existing games... but to instead, introduce new laws that would force or at least significantly pressure this current paradigm of game server stack development to change, to enable that 'strip down at EoL' process to be possible, and ideally, easy, if that new paradigm is in place.

Minecraft example

I mean... minecraft ia kind of notoriously memory inefficient... everywhere, at everything. I get that it makes sense as an example, you have experience with it, and it is very popular... but it is rather compute inefficient.

I also find this example, while generally illustrative of the kinds of problems that can occur...

You are using multiple third party, not officially connected to Minecraft, bits of software in your stack, to modify and add features and capabilities to the actual base game itself.

SKG says they want EoL games to be ideally fully function, or at least reasonably as functional as the base game is.

Your specific example here goes far beyind the scope of what SKG is asking for.

But, I also understand that you are using it to illustrate how generally... sometimes stacks don't scale well.

Destiny 2 example.

Well, no one is asking D2 to just release its entire stack as is.

If they hypotherically did release it as is... and its very complicated... I mean. Yeah. It probably is.

It probably is not as complicated as building an entire server emulator from basically juat packetsniffing the client... which many gaming communities have managed to do for many, many games over the years.

But uh, I bet Bungee has internal documentation on it.

Do an audit/review pass at EoL and release it?

Yeah, doing a standup would be hard and complicated.

That's fine! All SKG is asking for is for it to be legally possible, technically possible to stand up a server, as opposes to the current paradigm of ... essentially illegally reverse engineering the server/netcode and then running an emulator.

If the players are dedicated enough, and it is possible, they will figure it out. And I don't say that as cheery, unrealistic optimism... I say it because the even more complex task of just totally reverse engineering entire server/netcode has been done before, many, many times.

To just give one example: RPCS3, the PS3 emulator... yeah they made it entirely possible for two remote people to emulate the same game, connect to each other and play multiplayer games together.

https://wiki.rpcs3.net/index.php?title=RPCN_Compatibility_List

Its a work in progress... but yeah, this is just one example.

Which won't ever happen with AA or AAA devs unless it's legally required.

Yep. That's basically the point of SKG. Make it legally required.

This is actually remarkably easier and more simple to code than what the industry does now... if you've ever run or coded any servers

It's really not.

In an ideal scenario where you have time to actually plan things out, you have a shared, common library for the game logic and two different projects that use the library for dedicated servers running under self-hosted or scalable environments.

So firstly, I guess I wasn't clear here?

As indicated by my sentence above where you started your quote of me...

I meant that setting up a dedi server for actual shared worldspaces... and that alone, basically, as in old school fps games... that, that is much more simple.

If something like player inventory storage is handled by a dedicated service in the scalable environment, you can't use the same code for the self-hosted environment. To solve that, you create a InventoryStorage interface, a SQLBackedInventoryStorage implementation, and a MemoryBackedInventoryStorage implementation. Now you have abstraction, which makes the code harder to follow for on-boarding and maintenance purposes.

Secondly... I mean, you've described a solution here, to doing this in more modern games.

I have roughly done sort of an approximation of this over 15 years ago now, hooking up two GMod servers to a shared, seperate, player inventory db, as well as another db for the worldspace items of each server/map.

I figured out how to make a custom gamemode, configure it with things like uh, certain props like file cabinets also having their own inventory, which was persistent, as well as persistent world space dropped / semi random population of various items... and set up two basically map profiles within the gamemode... stuff like door ownership by specific players... ability to take items with you from the city map/server to the outlands map/server...

If an unpaid, not even 20 year old, with literally no formal CS schooling can figure this out, while going through uni... lets just say I woukd be very, very amused if this is somehow an unrealistic, overly difficult task for handsomely paid teams of professionals to figure out more a more complex game.

Like uh sure, at some point I would hit max map specific db saturation... but that wasn't really from the db itself. That was from if you tried to physics sim every single possible item in the map, simultaneously, or spawn every random loot item at once.

So what you do is... not that lol. You make items in world just go physics inert to most kinds of interactions, you keep most of them just in a player's inventory, or a containers inventory, have a tarkov style loot mexhanic in a gui, give containers a max volume and item count they can hold, only spawn a manageable number if a container explodes or is broken... you make the normal map load in first, block any connection attempts while you progressively spawn in world items on a tiny incrmentinf delay and/or batches and then do a verification pass, and then you allow connection attempts from players.

... And as for the shared player db... I can only ever remember that lagging when people were literally DDoSing something, or beta testing trying to dupe items... which i basically solved by mandating a bunch of client side and serverside warning triggers and conditions and cooldowns, and obfuscating the commands that would execute / show up in the player's console.

I realize this isn't anywhere near the same ... magnitude of scaling that like D2 or Warframe or something has, in its backend...

But the whole point would be to mandate that going forward, new games of that nature and scale, would have to offer some kind of lightweight, nowhere near as scale capable version of the server stuff at EoL....so they would just design this lightweight test version first, basically, then develop a tool ir script to translate between the small server framework and the huge scalable framework... and just do basic upkeep and maintenance on that conversion tool as the game gets more stuff overtime, and then at EoL, easy peasy, translate it all back to the small server format.

You could maybe do something like implementing a very long sort of string that encapsulates every single aspect of a persistent player account, then encrypt it, then give this code to players at EoL, then the new, light duty, blackbox server has a built in decrypter and recrypter... and there ya go, your player is now still persistent, hasn't lost anything, and can just hop to different post EoL servers, with all their stuff.

Or, you could have two different implementations of the dedicated server. That comes with even worse problems stemming from code duplication. If you want to make sure those two implementations are fully compatible with each other, you also have to add full integration tests... and the only common interface between them is the game client network protocol.

Yeah I wouldn't personally recommend that approach either, for the reasons you described.

Food for thought: what if the server source code is written in some scripting language like JavaScript or Python?

Ok, unfortunately it is 4 am and my thought injestor is rapidly losing consciousness... I'll try to get back to the rest of this after .z.. sleep...

Ah, ok, Chet was in a meeting with some actual networking coders who explained a single, particular, server architecture to him...

Where I can guarantee they were all at least mildly annoyed that he's decided to change the scope of the game, so now they have to change the architecture, instead of just... designing it from the ground up to be able to add that at some point, as opposed to ... having to reengineer the whole thing.

So, yep ok you got me, he has seen... actually no, he hasn't seen the code, because the people who actually can code, whom he just got out of this meeting with, know he couldn't read it or understand it.

So they gave him a white board or powerpoint presentation on the relevant concepts and how they relate to each other at a very high level.

How do I know this?

Because I have been in that group of actually tech-competent people, giving the new or totally inexperienced project manager, the same presentation, many, many times.

That and, there's no code in this video, at all.

Its pretty normal for people who actually understand code to... do code reviews with their team, go over it with a fine toothed comb, works well as a screenshare on Zoom or something like that...

...

You first say 'seems' and then say 'DEFINITELY'.

You again struggle with being precise, accurate and consistent.

Not good traits for someone who claims to understand highly complex technical problems.

...

What Chet is doing is the classic...

'im in over my head, i need to repeat everything i've just learned for the first time today as a vlog post to simultaneously help it stick in my brain while also outwardly appearing competent and responsible to easily impressed rubes'

...style thing that insecure project leads do quite often, you used to be able to see just metric fucktons of this kind of shit on linkedin, all the damned time, before it fully became a parody of itself.

He's panicking man, haha!

These are all brand new concepts to him, and he only bothered to, or was forced to learn them, after he screwed stuff up so bad that now his employees need to explain to him how badly he screwed up, and how complicated it will be to fix it.

If Chet was a competent project lead, and leader of a business, this video would not include '(my) company fail(ed)'' in the title, nor would he have ordered ... worse than a slew of new features, but a slew of new features that can only work if the backbone, the foundation of the game is basically redesigned, as will various bits and bobs that only currently work with the exact prior configuration that now has to change.

If Chet was a competent project lead, he would have outlined a development process that had contingency plan pivots built into it from the start, accounting for possible future changes to business conditions that should be expected over the course of dvelopment.

Not suddenly jump tracks after something he didn't initially plan for as a possibility, neccessitating a sudden crash course in why and how its actually really difficult to rebuild the foundation and support beams of a building after all the floors and walls and electrical and plumbing have been put in.

I've had good project leads, amazing project leads, and terrible ones.

Chet is acting like a terrible one.

...

Like I said, dude is out of his element, and is lashing out at others (Ross), doing projection, because he is insecure and too cowardly to admit it.

Also just... any project lead with a 'manifesto' ... this is a gigantic fucking red flag that this person is insecure and overcompensating, initially inflexible and stubborn, and then after he refuses to listen people he ostensibly hired because he values their subject matter expertise ... well, then, his 'vision' cracks at the seams everyone was telling him would likely occur, and then he panics.

Seen it happen first hand more times than I wish I did.

...

Oh right, uh yeah, when you are being a project lead, and business director, for the first time... yeah that absolutely is 'taking your first steps into trying to make an indie game.'

Has he... ever done those things before?

No...?

First steps.

He seems to have used those first steps to jump headlong into the deep end, not realizing the pool hasn't been properly cleaned in two years, but yeah, he did take those first steps into this pool, for the first time.

If I am a coder with a lot of experience in, I dunno, sql database structuring and queries... and then boss asks me to also learn the weird, proprietary version of javascript that the weird, 3rd party tool we use uses to make a complex, 200 field input page with interdepedent logic, and hook that all into the sql database?

Well, I say I have prior experience with javascript in general, but not this unique implementation of it that tears out half the standard core functions and replacss them with custom ones... so i am 'taking my first steps' into this particular dialect or variant of javascript, might take me a bit to familiarize myself with the differences and get my bearings.

Software development is not just 'a speciality'.

It is actually hundreds or thousands of different specialities, which are lumped into a broad category, and non-tech lay people basically always think its 100 times less complicated than it actually is.

Whoo boy, looks like the .world mods are enforcing silent compliance with fascist brutality again, thats a lot of highly upvoted deleted comments.

One of these days they'll suck the boot so far down their throats they'll asphyxiatiate, but at least they'll pass with joyful tears in their eyes.