Kickstarter to fix the netcode?

(SphereCow) #1

This is one of my favorite games of all time but the netcode is just so bad. If you ever opened up the animations in a tool like Blender or Maya you’d see that they are smooth and well done but in game there seems to be no snapshot interpolation whatsoever. What are the chances of this ancient dinosaur of a legendary game being fixed given a fundraiser?

(rorgoroth) #2

I’ve spent about 3 hours doing the math and according to my calculations: About 0 chances.

(SphereCow) #3

Maybe. But It might be possible if people started making things for the game.

People barely modded it at all despite it having a luxurious SDK.

(rorgoroth) #4

Unless any of three things happens:

  • SD/whoever open source engine
  • someone leaks the source
  • someone insane RE’s the engine

Then the netcode will never be fixed.

I think I bought ETQW maybe 6 month after it came out and I played probably less than 50 hours because of how bad the online is, I went back to playing Wolf:ET. Dirty Bomb was much better online but not sure what state the online community is there now, gameplay is still like et/qw so you could always check it out if you haven’t already.

(edxot) #6

You guys are saying that you don’t play anymore but I don’t believe you.

And so, you know perfectly well that the last version was 1.4 (or was it 5, lol).
And even if that was the “last version” , this game kept changing over time.
Didn’t you notice how vehicles spawn faster than they used to ?
Or like the lag spikes before death disapeared and now we got something with these other side efects: you trigger mines from miles away and sometimes it looks like you have an aimbot.

And this after the “pathetic noobs that bough this game” were forced to play against fakes all the time without any way of deanonimizing them.

(edxot) #7

But I believe you are saying the truth when you say you want to save this game. And I can help you a lot in that matter. In fact what I have to say about this is just too much for one post. But I will do it anyway because I can’t drop out of this game without saying all this. And sorry in advance for the long text, for the bad english, and for hijacking your thread. And if anyone knows of something that is wrong, please tell me, I want to know, because even without any evidences that I can present, what I am going to say, is what I believe.

When I recently saw those Pliscin videos on youtube, it reminded me how the game was for me, a long time ago. There are several posts of me on this forum, from that time, where I almost insinuate that everyone else is a noob, and should stop messing around with their latency/net configs and commands. Because I was doing nothing and it was working perfectly for me. From that time I remember games where I would go in a room with four enemies, and probably kill most of them. Just like in pliscin movies, everyone was taking ages to react to me. But I don’t think this is just to him. I believe it helps all german players. I say it this way, because the game started to be different for me at some point. And it was after I told everyone that in fact I wasn’t german, and the colors on my nick were just a failed attempt to look like a flame.
I also remember that longer before that, from my very early days of etqw, pliscin was talking to me all the time. At some point he asked me why was my ping a lot higher than everyone else (it was like 60 or 80 - maybe, don’t remember that well. while all these other germans had pings bellow 30 or 40 maybe). So I told him that I was in Portugal. He replied “cool” and that was it. I think he probably though I was german, but out of the country, and so, he gave me the same treatment like if I was german.
What I am saying is this: I was never that good like I looked to be.
I mean, in the splatterladder phase, those games where I was doing better than everyone one else, all of you have been cheated.
And I also have to say that I am very sorry about all the insults directed at almost everyone in this game. But from that age, from my perspective, everyone looked like a noob to me. They were just sooo slow, what else would I think ?

Till this day, I don’t yet know who is to blame for this.
I think to myself, could this be just some firewall left from the cold war age, that lets pings pass through, but inspects all other traffic to decide if it should pass or not. Causing the delay many of the players see (even with low pings)
This could cause the behavior we see in the game. But then this other thing strikes me: It Can’t be that.
Because I was doing well, and then changed to bad, and it happened right after I said I wasn’t german. So, someone controls this lag that we all have. And it’s logical to think it’s someone from Germany.

Don’t you germans think this post is against you at all. In fact this is a serious warning. You look like you have the best players in the world, but you are in fact the worst. You have been playing this version of the game, where you only have fair fights against other germans, while everyone else seems really weak.

Meanwhile (in 2010 ? maybe, not sure) something changed. With this “german lag” still in action, this same mechanism of showing one thing and doing another was introduced to the game itself. Devs dit it ? I don’t know. Maybe some devs ?
I don’t want to go against the developers of this game, because most of them are probably hard workers, have nothing to do with this, and the work they realized (etqw) is just the best thing ever.
Note: Not sure of any of this, btw, but this is still what I believe.
This other latency increase, was inside the game, and could help to balance the game. And so I believe they implemented it in this way:
The attacking team starts the game with a lot of extra latency, then it decreases as time goes by. At the end of the game it is the defending team that gets lagged.

But I also know that have been some guys who hacked servers where everyone was playing (this could also be system administrators without hacking anything,btw). And changed things in the game. Like changing map objectives. This even introduced bugs (3 maps campaign ending with 2-2 score).
I have to say to the developers that did this, that I don’t like this extra lag for balance. For several reasons:

  • It let’s a server hacker change this during games and lag people in a different way. And I believe I saw this already several times. Done in several different ways, being the most common: engies rule over all other classes (no lag for them).
  • Makes it a lot harder to spot cheaters (with aimbot).
  • And makes it harder for players to tweak their game. You can’t even tell if you are doing better or not.
    LAG IS BAD, ask anyone.

The reason I am telling all this, is for you to understand the problem you are facing.
In fact what I believe is much worse. I would not be surprised, from what I have seen, that there are now versions of this “invisible latency increase” in all sizes and shapes. Either from being created on the client game (making the game packets go through a FIFO buffer), to the server side, where every player gets a buffer of his own specif size, to the line side of things. This last (line) is probably the easier,btw. You just need to have root on the router in front of the server, and edit iptables config file. Add 3 lines to it. One line to make you safe from all this (or maybe a range of players, like in the german case), second line to make all other traffic to go to some specific server/router that will bounce it back, and third line to pick the traffic that was sent to the side, to go in the server like it was supposed to. I know what some of you are thinking, the second like must include a clause to exclude the traffic from the side server, and so, it does). If you didn’t understand any of this, IPTABLES is a linux firewall, from the very early days. This can obviously be done in many different ways (for example, there are other firewalls), and discussing all these is not my purpose now or at this point ( I am a bit noob in this networking thing myself, so can’t add much to any discussion on that).

Still related to this, I would like your opinion, or anyone’s else opinion, about this specific question: Is Pliscin responsible for this lag that others players have ?
I mean, other players getting extra lag when playing against germans.

I have some reasons to believe it is him, and some reasons to believe it is not.
Against him

  • It looked like he knew that I was completely lagged when he was making his videos. Remember the knife kills ?
    (but then, maybe he just saw that I was doing very bad against everyone at that time, and decided to get some videos of it.
  • It was him who asked me where I was playing from. (but someone else might have heard our talk, and taken the same conclusion)
  • After that time when everyone knew I wasn’t german, he kept trying to troll me in every possible occasion. Understand this, mr pliscin, you can’t pretend you are so good like you show in your videos, and then go around making all efforts to troll me. And this even shows how lame you are in that matter as well. Remember when you told me “this is the most important trick jump in etqw imo” ? And then you made that jump that was completely useless. Even your lies are ridiculous because you are just a kid, and make up lies that are just the most stupid thing someone ever said about etqw. I mean, you can fool everyone else but you will never fool me because what I just told you. If you were better than me, in any stupid dimension, you would not be following me around and trolling .

In favour

  • When I was playing without lag, I was also thinking that everyone else was a noob. So, maybe this is not his fault.
  • Even if those were just 3 lines of text on iptables, I don’t believe he is smart enough to do this (because his trolling attempts were so naive).
  • He exposed his face when making the videos ( if he had done all this lili thing I described earlier, I don’t believe he would be exposing himself like this).

So, till this day, I don’t know if it’s him doing this or if is someone else.
Don’t know if he/someone was doing it and then stopped when it was included in the game.

All I know is that at some point, nobody could play this game if I was in the server together with pliscin. Everyone would get extremely lagged. During this “conspiracy” phase I detected a weird pattern in people. Some of them were trying to understand what was going on, raising questions, and throwing guesses, like me or any other regular player. Some other were accusing me straight. And the funny thing (the pattern) is that they were accusing me of what they were doing.

  • I mean, Pliscin was accusing of “crushing” servers, but it was him doing it.
  • DrJekyll accused me of being toxic. That’s what he was doing, using an aimbot but only against me, and then telling people “that I had lost my mojo”
  • This other funny guy told me that I was a noob since ever,“I never could hit anything” he said (you know where this is going lol).
  • And then Dissected-Remains. From the beginning I would not think he was involved in any of this. But one time he blew it. I was in the server, playing gdf in fake nick, and someone else also in fake nick was in the server and was getting most kills (in gdf too). Then Dissected shows up in the server, and tells that guy that his specific account had been connected to me (edxot) that had been trolling servers and that he must talk to him in private. So, why didn’t he think that that guy was me ??? He was lying, pure and simple. Either he knew it wasn’t me, or he didn’t know. He can’t pretend it was both. At least to me, he can’t. And to confirm this, just ask him what he meant when he said this “I am sure he can’t do his stuff on our servers”. How can he be sure of that ? If he is supposed to “not know” what I was doing.

All I know, is that before I left this game recently, someone told me this: “Pliscin is a well respected member of the gaming community.”
This is ridiculous, at least from where I stand. Not only he was disconnecting everyone from servers and blaming someone else (first some american guy and then me) , he was also trolling me around all the time, and I have seen he doing all sorts of retarded things like staying in the midle of 8 friends waiting revive without any enemies nearby, and no revives for any of them.
This guy, to me, looks like just another stupid kid. The kind that should get a temporary ban to learn the lesson, but only temporary the first time.
And he was also trolling around together with DrJekyll. Still remember that time when I joined a server and gdf already getting spawn killed in the last objective of area22, with 13 minutes left, and when someone got tired and planted the bomb on the objective, DrJekyll started to taunt the planter. Yes, the same DrJekyll, that I caught using an aimbot, and aparently, only using it, when he was sure he was going to an area where he would have to fight me. And this could have worked perfectly for him, because of the lag I have been talking, if it wasn’t for that single episode I would never think he was cheating (I explained this episode in other threads, does not fit in here)

If you guys really want to stop this lag (that I call lili thing) and get this game back up, you may want to try this:

  • Get some time information (timestamp with something else) to go into the game packets, that will mimic the behavior of ping. Then in client game, you show both values, ping measured with ICMP protocol, and the ping you measured from the game traffic.
    If you can do this, It will not stop these type of attacks, but will expose them.

Btw, notice that this lili thing can be done in any type of game that tries to make the same (anti-lag). This is a huge problem.

To fix this we have to wait a few more years. Some people are saying that you can’t have security and privacy at the same time in the internet.
And this is completely true !!!
Some of them are full of the wrong reasons and intentions, but they ended up getting out the correct result.
In fact what you can do, is to copy what you do in real life. If someone does something illegal, then he is responsible for it, and gets caught in the logs. But this forces a system where you can tell what everyone did. And there goes the privacy down the drain.

Some people will realize this and start to develop something different.
If I had to do it myself, internet would be served with 3 connections. One to a secure network, another to a privacy preserving network, and another to streaming services (tv kind).
In this way you would connect devices to the desired network. But the available protocols would be a restricted set of what we have nowadays. Without any overlap between the 3 networks. So, if someone tries to mess around in the security network, it all gets logged, and the device causing it can probably be detected very fast and stopped (maybe neural networks can produce AI models to have this done instantly)
The privacy preserving network would do the opposite, throw any logs away as soon as possible.
Of course this needs a lot more thinking and planning, but it’s just an idea, if someone wants to pick it.
But before all that, people must realize that this internet is not what they intended to. It all works, does what was intended, and a lot more. The design is flexible. Everything looks good and amazing, but everyone knows better than this now.

This because even if you fix this in etqw, you can still get ddos (real ddos that you can see with ping) from anywhere in the world.

(edxot) #8

Second thing, even more important.
BALANCE
Is this a man’s job ?
HAHAHAHAHAHA
Not anymore, not in etqw, forget it. This is a machine’s job.
And this is probably not that hard to do (at least, I have seen a lot worse).

Didn’t you guys (devs still changing the game) do what I suggested you to ?
You remember, in that discussion about what was more important, kills or xp. I told you it should be the most kills on defense if defense wins or most xp in attack if attack wins.

I also told you that it would probably be a bad idea to make something like this available to the general public. Because then people play for stats and not for victory. And the game becomes different. And don’t get me wrong it is still an interesting game. But it’s not the same. When you are playing for the victory (and nothing else) you don’t have to worry about how your stats are going to look in the end. So, you got a lot more strategies available, and this is the best thing of etqw, the number of possible strategies. I would not dare to try to calculate this number, just think about vehicles and team-play, just give up.

From what I seen, it looks like you guys have implemented this ranking system then. And kept it private (at least from me). But then I go play and it seems that everyone else knows about this rank, and some even talk about it.
Wasn’t that what I saw in that area22 map ? DrJekyll wanted strogg to keep spawnkilling for 13 minutes without planting, just to make sure Pliscin would get most kills and still lose the map .
Right ?
This suggests you didn’t make it in a way where every player gets a score in the end ?
If you can decide on the best player, you just have to pick him as 1st, and remove him from the pack, then repeat the process for the 2nd, and so on.
So you can rank all players after a match.

You guys should rank people in this way, but not globally. You should make a rank in every server. Then this rank could be used to make something else.
You have to feed this data to a neural network. And ask it to guess the game outcome in real time (only by having the teams composition).
With this data available in real time in the game, 2 things can be done.

  • Show it to people in the hud.
  • Force a player switch ( I believe the neural network could also suggest a player switch. And the one everyone wants is the one that would make it harder to guess the game result).

Or then don’t force anything. But at least show people how unbalanced the game is at every moment.

And yet we can think a lot bigger. The neural network can be fed a lot more data,
If a player is afk, the neural network should know about it (have it as input), no ? And at least the name of the map, right ?
Well maybe if any specific player is afk, or has been afk, or his recent history/activity, or at least a percentage of the time is is afk.
Or then forget the afk thing, because I already can see people going afk, just to see how the “balance score” would change. Or to force the server to make a switch.

*Note: when I said “teamplay and vehicles”, I meant team play among vehicles (and not multiple players in a vehicle). Things like military columns, for example, you know, tank in the front, then APC, then transport armadillos, and maybe with scout huskies in the front.

Third thing, how game interacts with players.

You guys probably know that there is an old game that is still very successful. It shares something with etqw, btw. It’s also an unbalanced game by design (unless you play it zerg vs zerg, terran vs terran or protoss vs protoss, of course).
This game kept being changed for a very long time, and then it got stable. Till this day, many people still play it, besides all the little bugs and glitches. And also besides all the unfair little battles in the game, just like in etqw.

Note: If a game admin spots a player being very successful with a very lame activity, this is not a bad thing, it’s just another one to add to the huge pile. In fact the game is that, all these little lame things that work so well, that won’t get you any friends or recognition, but will get you victories.

In South Korea, Starcraft is the sport most played. Till this day I miss a player that got banned some years ago. He got banned for match fixing. Till this day, I cry everytime I see a zerg losing against a terran. Because that player really knew how to beat terrans with zerg (his use of ling lurker was just superb).

Well, banning this guy in public, with all the attention, worked really well for them, didn’t it ?
Can we dream of having this in etqw too ?

And things done in the clear, with everyone’s knowledge.
This has to be the way to go.

Fourth thing.
Why am I doing all the talk ?

Forum only let’s me make 3 posts in a row, so, either someone else provides some feed back or bye bye all.

(rorgoroth) #9

Probably because you are only one of few that care so much about it all.

I have no interest in the game for many years, it will not ever be fixed. I’m just praying the code gets leaked one day.

(edxot) #10

I should probably go back to wolf:et as well.
But this game is more permissive with noobs. You can enjoy the game even if you have a bad pc or bad latency.
At least until the game gets unbalanced, half crowd gets frustated and the other half gets bored. And everyone disconects.

(Setlec) #11

The source code belong to id Software and not SD. But SD can petition to have the game src code released it won’t happen. Why? well ETQW has the first implementation of MegaTexture and releasing it is a no go. So for the source code to be released then the whole graphical engine has to be modified/changed before any thing. And no one will do that at SD nor at ZeniMax Media ( id Software’s parent company).

honestly i would love to see a remake using UE5 than using idTech 5.x+.