4 ms·

What exactly is your point here? Console games need (mostly the same kind of) netcode as well. They are just generally harder to exploit, which dramatically low

by cybrox 4y ago

What exactly is your point here? Console games need (mostly the same kind of) netcode as well. They are just generally harder to exploit, which dramatically lowers the amount of people trying to do so. They are capable of writing a netcode that is good enough for an environment where it is relatively safe due to the restrictions of the devices it runs on but not for any true open environment. - So they just write bad netcode, that's all.

Cloudef 4y ago
PC gaming unfortunately never evolved in form where games would run in a sandboxed environment. Linux + flatpak steam + proton is probably the closest you can get without too many practical issues.
- cybrox 4y ago
  This has its own up- and downsides. While the game not being sandboxed creates risks for the consumers (as demonstrated by FROM with Dark Souls 3) and allows people to more easily exploit the game, it also makes modding and often times supporting a game long past its original lifetime possible. Personally, I would love to have the benefits of sandboxing but I would not want to live without modding and community supported servers. The console market shows us how consumers are abused in an environment where they have no say in what happens to the software that they purchased.
  - Cloudef 4y ago
    How does sandboxing kill modding? You still can modify anything inside the sandbox, the running process just can't escape the sandbox. (Meaning any damage is mitigated, or more controlled) By a sandbox, I don't mean we should lock our systems behind a jailed garden like consoles do it.
    - cybrox 4y ago
      Sandboxing itself won't. The way publishers and distributors will implement sandboxing will. Someone will develop a reasonable, possibly quite open sandboxing technology. That technology goes on to be adopted by one or multiple major publishers. Over the years, anti-cheat and other proprietary detection mechanisms get more and more prevalent within it. Connection to multiplayer servers will no longer be possible without the publisher-provided sandbox. Modding will be more and more restricted until eventually, some form of paid-mods or user-store within the now completely publisher-controlled runtime environment appears. Call me pessimistic but that's what I gather from my last two decades of gaming with highlights such as Origin scanning your whole machine, DS shadowbanning people, etc.
      - Cloudef 4y ago
        Right, this is a real fear on closed platforms like OSX and Windows. Microsoft is actually going to this direction with the pluton platform. But this also means the "personal" from PC gets taken away. The thing is, software developers themselves can't achieve lock-in and take over the control how the code gets executed on your PC if the platform you are running does not provide this feature in the first place. So typical sandboxing on Linux will never go in the ways of DRM, or give control to the publisher of the software. Your fear will become true, if software starts targetting or even preferring a trusted platform instead of a open platform like the PC we currently have. But this is not fault of a sandboxing technology itself, it's the fault of companies looking to have control over their product and their users. Unfortunately, I can see future going towards with trusted platforms, where users on non-trusted system will be heavily handicapped, for example netflix not allowing 4k streaming, multiplayer games not allowing you online, or putting you on different servers etc... Valve's linux + proton push may make developers keep targeting the proton WIN32 subset in the future, but we'll see... Regarding modding, many online games do not allow it even in the current form, requiring you to play offline if the game is modified, or connect to a custom server. By the way, on linux you can easily achieve a sandbox using bwrap https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  How is sandboxing relevant here? A sandbox limits the capabilities of untrusted software to affect the outside system. It does not do anything for cheating, the system administrator can affect the sandboxed software in any way they want.
unnouinceput 4y ago
My point is that if you want to create a proper server you do the heavy lifting on server, not on client. The second you let the client decide who does what (location / damage / item drop etc etc) you get cheaters that will modify their client to bid their rule. Hence why I consider FromSoftware servers childish.
- Trasmatta 4y ago
  > Hence why I consider FromSoftware servers childish. Servers in FromSoft games are only for matchmaking. The actual gameplay has always been peer to peer. The design of the games mean that making the multiplayer entirely online server based would not work. They're peer to peer because that's the best way to support the hybrid singleplayer / multiplayer design where players drop into and out of your world. Otherwise your world state would need to be consistently synced to the server, which introduces major problems -- in particular, the fact that you would be dealing with lag in a game that you spend mostly singleplayer. They would have to rework the game design to be able to effectively make the multiplayer run on dedicated servers instead of P2P.
  - meheleventyone 4y ago
    > Servers in FromSoft games are only for matchmaking. The actual gameplay has always been peer to peer. The design of the games mean that making the multiplayer entirely online server based would not work. They're peer to peer because that's the best way to support the hybrid singleplayer / multiplayer design where players drop into and out of your world. Otherwise your world state would need to be consistently synced to the server, which introduces major problems -- in particular, the fact that you would be dealing with lag in a game that you spend mostly singleplayer. This isn't quite true, they could have on-demand spin up of a "server" and hand off relevant gameplay decisions to it but it would be a ludicrous overcomplication and expensive for one small part of the actual game. Switching to a rollback system for their peer-peer networking would do a lot to prevent exploits though but would likely be a significant and difficult change with the determinism requirements.
- fartsucker69 4y ago

by cybrox 4y ago

Cloudef 4y ago

PC gaming unfortunately never evolved in form where games would run in a sandboxed environment. Linux + flatpak steam + proton is probably the closest you can get without too many practical issues.

cybrox 4y ago
This has its own up- and downsides. While the game not being sandboxed creates risks for the consumers (as demonstrated by FROM with Dark Souls 3) and allows people to more easily exploit the game, it also makes modding and often times supporting a game long past its original lifetime possible. Personally, I would love to have the benefits of sandboxing but I would not want to live without modding and community supported servers. The console market shows us how consumers are abused in an environment where they have no say in what happens to the software that they purchased.
- Cloudef 4y ago
  How does sandboxing kill modding? You still can modify anything inside the sandbox, the running process just can't escape the sandbox. (Meaning any damage is mitigated, or more controlled) By a sandbox, I don't mean we should lock our systems behind a jailed garden like consoles do it.
  - cybrox 4y ago
    Sandboxing itself won't. The way publishers and distributors will implement sandboxing will. Someone will develop a reasonable, possibly quite open sandboxing technology. That technology goes on to be adopted by one or multiple major publishers. Over the years, anti-cheat and other proprietary detection mechanisms get more and more prevalent within it. Connection to multiplayer servers will no longer be possible without the publisher-provided sandbox. Modding will be more and more restricted until eventually, some form of paid-mods or user-store within the now completely publisher-controlled runtime environment appears. Call me pessimistic but that's what I gather from my last two decades of gaming with highlights such as Origin scanning your whole machine, DS shadowbanning people, etc.
    - Cloudef 4y ago
      Right, this is a real fear on closed platforms like OSX and Windows. Microsoft is actually going to this direction with the pluton platform. But this also means the "personal" from PC gets taken away. The thing is, software developers themselves can't achieve lock-in and take over the control how the code gets executed on your PC if the platform you are running does not provide this feature in the first place. So typical sandboxing on Linux will never go in the ways of DRM, or give control to the publisher of the software. Your fear will become true, if software starts targetting or even preferring a trusted platform instead of a open platform like the PC we currently have. But this is not fault of a sandboxing technology itself, it's the fault of companies looking to have control over their product and their users. Unfortunately, I can see future going towards with trusted platforms, where users on non-trusted system will be heavily handicapped, for example netflix not allowing 4k streaming, multiplayer games not allowing you online, or putting you on different servers etc... Valve's linux + proton push may make developers keep targeting the proton WIN32 subset in the future, but we'll see... Regarding modding, many online games do not allow it even in the current form, requiring you to play offline if the game is modified, or connect to a custom server. By the way, on linux you can easily achieve a sandbox using bwrap https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap
rhn_mk1 4y ago
How is sandboxing relevant here? A sandbox limits the capabilities of untrusted software to affect the outside system. It does not do anything for cheating, the system administrator can affect the sandboxed software in any way they want.

unnouinceput 4y ago

My point is that if you want to create a proper server you do the heavy lifting on server, not on client. The second you let the client decide who does what (location / damage / item drop etc etc) you get cheaters that will modify their client to bid their rule. Hence why I consider FromSoftware servers childish.

Trasmatta 4y ago
> Hence why I consider FromSoftware servers childish. Servers in FromSoft games are only for matchmaking. The actual gameplay has always been peer to peer. The design of the games mean that making the multiplayer entirely online server based would not work. They're peer to peer because that's the best way to support the hybrid singleplayer / multiplayer design where players drop into and out of your world. Otherwise your world state would need to be consistently synced to the server, which introduces major problems -- in particular, the fact that you would be dealing with lag in a game that you spend mostly singleplayer. They would have to rework the game design to be able to effectively make the multiplayer run on dedicated servers instead of P2P.
- meheleventyone 4y ago
  > Servers in FromSoft games are only for matchmaking. The actual gameplay has always been peer to peer. The design of the games mean that making the multiplayer entirely online server based would not work. They're peer to peer because that's the best way to support the hybrid singleplayer / multiplayer design where players drop into and out of your world. Otherwise your world state would need to be consistently synced to the server, which introduces major problems -- in particular, the fact that you would be dealing with lag in a game that you spend mostly singleplayer. This isn't quite true, they could have on-demand spin up of a "server" and hand off relevant gameplay decisions to it but it would be a ludicrous overcomplication and expensive for one small part of the actual game. Switching to a rollback system for their peer-peer networking would do a lot to prevent exploits though but would likely be a significant and difficult change with the determinism requirements.
fartsucker69 4y ago