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This was part of the exciting suggestion of the original Stadia trailers: with the entire game and all the interactions happening in Google datacentres, you wou

This was part of the exciting suggestion of the original Stadia trailers: with the entire game and all the interactions happening in Google datacentres, you would only need to receive a rendered version, and suddenly all this would be possible. Of course none of that has happened and Google folded their games studio, which is par for them, but does go some way to reinforcing this point that there's a reason this stuff isn't done.

zolland 5y ago
Isn't that how multiplayer games work today? You receive a rendering of the server's source of truth, and send actions you'd like to perform. The current implementation just sends a lot less data to the client by sending deltas and positional data rather than full screen renderings right? It seems like that wouldn't fix any of the issues above, and might just introduce the complexity of streaming video to all the clients, and replicating world state to all the video streaming servers.
- georgeecollins 5y ago
  Yes. Typically you are seeing an interpolations between the last agreed source of truth - 1 time interval and the last agreed source of truth. The idea is that all inputs will be received for +1 time interval before you get to the actual last agreed on source of truth (which becomes the last agreed source of truth -1 time interval ).
- gloriousternary 5y ago
  With Stadia et al. your computer sends keystrokes and mouse movements to Google's servers, and the server returns a video feed that's then displayed on your screen. Today's multiplayer games send and receive movement information and such, but the graphics rendering, which I believe is the main issue here, is still done client-side.
  - gameswithgo 5y ago
    we try to send something as close as just keystrokes in games too, to prevent cheating among other reasons. sometimes we have to send actual state though
  - setr 5y ago
    I don’t think graphics rendering is really the problem — worst comes to worst, you just reduce graphical fidelity — and regardless, rendering 300 AI characters roaming around is clearly doable, and it’d be the same with viewing real players. It’s a client-side problem, and doesn’t have to really scale much with player count (Stadia’s main pitch was that you didn’t need high end PCs to play AAA games — not that it would enhance games’ ability to play online) The hard part is dealing with 300 players communicating simultaneously with random delays and state changes, in an environment that doesn’t really handle delays very well (a text chat can be 10s late and no one cares. A character moving can only be a frames late before interpolation becomes obvious, and you start teleporting people around). And tracking the state changes across users and passing them around tends to add up, causing further delays. Of course, you could always change the game model itself too. RuneScape & Maplestory trivially enabled large groups of players simultaneously (pretty sure you could easily find places with 200+ players visible and active). Runescape was basically turn-based and ran like 1 turn a second, so much larger room for delays. Maplestory capped actual active play to relatively few players, but enabled large quantities in towns acting as glorified visual chat rooms — which solved 90% of the feeling of being in a large community. The Maplestory strategy I think nearly every MMO implements.
    - jfrunyon 5y ago
      The delays, interpolation, etc. are a big problem in games like FPS, but I fail to see why they'd be a large problem in an MMO. Why can't you just send the new position of other visible players, and then client-side play those characters' walking animations to the new position from their current (client-side) position? Unless the accuracy of another player's targeting is relevant why is there a problem with their position always being delayed by, say, a second?
      - patmcc 5y ago
        A good MMO typically isn't just a large number of players walking around and not interacting with one another. Look at Eve Online; you have a spaceship, you travel around and shoot stuff (this is simplifying it, but that's a big part of it). Sometimes there are 100 or 1000 ships all involved in one battle; what do you have to deal with in that case? You need to send all ship data (model, loadout, customizations) to every client so they can load in the right assets. You need to track where each ship is (in 3d) and where it's going at any given time. You need to track what weapons are firing, and who they might hit (there are missiles, interception missiles, "bombs" with an explosion radius, lasers that hitscan, guns that have tracking projectiles, etc). You need to compute status effects that may change based on distance between given ships. You need to send all this data to each client regularly (every second at least). This really adds up, both in compute and memory on the server and in amount of data that needs to be sent to each client. It gets difficult quickly. Let's say all the info above can be described in 1kb/ship/tick - you get up to the larger battles, which in Eve have hit 5000+ (rarely, yes) - and you're dealing with 5000kb/tick going to every one of those clients.
- rasz 5y ago
  In modern multiplayer games "server" is just a thin layer passing packets around with zero validation, then you have a rootkit installed on clients trying to sniff for known cheat signatures, again not doing any packet validation. No true server source of truth, no common sense packet parsing, just sand castles and cheats allowing you to fly around and spawn items.
deleted 5y ago
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fooey 5y ago
Stadia isn't magic though, it just runs on whatever random GPU they have lying around. It was never going to be better than what you can build yourself.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 5y ago
  When Stadia was announced it was full AMD GPUs (probably because of their Linux drivers)
- Fomite 5y ago
  No, but it might have been better than what you had.
- fulafel 5y ago
  This is counter to their published information, and also would be throwing away console style homogenous hw advantage for no upside.

zolland 5y ago

Isn't that how multiplayer games work today? You receive a rendering of the server's source of truth, and send actions you'd like to perform. The current implementation just sends a lot less data to the client by sending deltas and positional data rather than full screen renderings right? It seems like that wouldn't fix any of the issues above, and might just introduce the complexity of streaming video to all the clients, and replicating world state to all the video streaming servers.

georgeecollins 5y ago
Yes. Typically you are seeing an interpolations between the last agreed source of truth - 1 time interval and the last agreed source of truth. The idea is that all inputs will be received for +1 time interval before you get to the actual last agreed on source of truth (which becomes the last agreed source of truth -1 time interval ).
gloriousternary 5y ago
With Stadia et al. your computer sends keystrokes and mouse movements to Google's servers, and the server returns a video feed that's then displayed on your screen. Today's multiplayer games send and receive movement information and such, but the graphics rendering, which I believe is the main issue here, is still done client-side.
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  we try to send something as close as just keystrokes in games too, to prevent cheating among other reasons. sometimes we have to send actual state though
- setr 5y ago
  I don’t think graphics rendering is really the problem — worst comes to worst, you just reduce graphical fidelity — and regardless, rendering 300 AI characters roaming around is clearly doable, and it’d be the same with viewing real players. It’s a client-side problem, and doesn’t have to really scale much with player count (Stadia’s main pitch was that you didn’t need high end PCs to play AAA games — not that it would enhance games’ ability to play online) The hard part is dealing with 300 players communicating simultaneously with random delays and state changes, in an environment that doesn’t really handle delays very well (a text chat can be 10s late and no one cares. A character moving can only be a frames late before interpolation becomes obvious, and you start teleporting people around). And tracking the state changes across users and passing them around tends to add up, causing further delays. Of course, you could always change the game model itself too. RuneScape & Maplestory trivially enabled large groups of players simultaneously (pretty sure you could easily find places with 200+ players visible and active). Runescape was basically turn-based and ran like 1 turn a second, so much larger room for delays. Maplestory capped actual active play to relatively few players, but enabled large quantities in towns acting as glorified visual chat rooms — which solved 90% of the feeling of being in a large community. The Maplestory strategy I think nearly every MMO implements.
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    The delays, interpolation, etc. are a big problem in games like FPS, but I fail to see why they'd be a large problem in an MMO. Why can't you just send the new position of other visible players, and then client-side play those characters' walking animations to the new position from their current (client-side) position? Unless the accuracy of another player's targeting is relevant why is there a problem with their position always being delayed by, say, a second?
    - patmcc 5y ago
      A good MMO typically isn't just a large number of players walking around and not interacting with one another. Look at Eve Online; you have a spaceship, you travel around and shoot stuff (this is simplifying it, but that's a big part of it). Sometimes there are 100 or 1000 ships all involved in one battle; what do you have to deal with in that case? You need to send all ship data (model, loadout, customizations) to every client so they can load in the right assets. You need to track where each ship is (in 3d) and where it's going at any given time. You need to track what weapons are firing, and who they might hit (there are missiles, interception missiles, "bombs" with an explosion radius, lasers that hitscan, guns that have tracking projectiles, etc). You need to compute status effects that may change based on distance between given ships. You need to send all this data to each client regularly (every second at least). This really adds up, both in compute and memory on the server and in amount of data that needs to be sent to each client. It gets difficult quickly. Let's say all the info above can be described in 1kb/ship/tick - you get up to the larger battles, which in Eve have hit 5000+ (rarely, yes) - and you're dealing with 5000kb/tick going to every one of those clients.
rasz 5y ago
In modern multiplayer games "server" is just a thin layer passing packets around with zero validation, then you have a rootkit installed on clients trying to sniff for known cheat signatures, again not doing any packet validation. No true server source of truth, no common sense packet parsing, just sand castles and cheats allowing you to fly around and spawn items.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

fooey 5y ago

Stadia isn't magic though, it just runs on whatever random GPU they have lying around. It was never going to be better than what you can build yourself.

ThatMedicIsASpy 5y ago
When Stadia was announced it was full AMD GPUs (probably because of their Linux drivers)
Fomite 5y ago
No, but it might have been better than what you had.
fulafel 5y ago
This is counter to their published information, and also would be throwing away console style homogenous hw advantage for no upside.