For an online shooter, a better tech job, or an unpleasant experience. Whether the network is lax, or your characters are going somewhere other than the ones you have chased, the frustration can go away. And that's exactly what Riot engineers want to fix Allowed.
During a recent trip to Los Angeles, Polygon visited Riot's headquarters and sat down with a few game engineers to talk about how they were planning to solve players' frustration before it happened.
In accordance with Allowed senior software engineer David Straily, one of Riot's top players Allowed competitive loyalty. The goal is to have everything in the game properly and that players can trust their game systems to properly register their activities.
“The competitive advantage is that in every single game you play, whether you win or lose, you are responsible for that outcome,” said Straily. “Without the mistake of a computer, internet, or game servers, you control your destiny. Our game is hard to make really good, but that's okay. That's a guarantee of passing. ”
In the engineering team, the challenge is Allowed to make yourself completely invisible. It is possible, if players think of something technical side of Allowed, whether it's seconds, latency, or registrations, it's because they have bad experiences about it.
"As engineers and professionals to do our work we did it when no one saw what we did," Allowed Engineering manager Dave Heironymus says. "If they complain about any of these things, we don't do our job."
Top network engineer Paul Chamberlain comes in and says, "we want to simplify the experience and when it comes in the way that is the problem."
All this technical interpretation should start with it AllowedServers. Servers in multiplayer games are where games are held. The number of server ratings how often it interacts with the computers it manages in each game. The more common the communication, the more accurate actions are recorded. For most first-person shooters, the average server is 64 in the mark. AllowedThe entire servers will be 128 disabled, which means they will be able to communicate with their customers faster.
Servers with higher kick values help smooth movements, since the server receives twice as many updates than the player's location from the running computers. This makes steering easier and easier, but it also makes navigation look more natural and manageable. It also makes it easy for Riot to make sure that every character is included in it Allowed registers well.
Servers are updating which is not easy or cheap to maintain. In fact, in the case of similar games Rating-Strike: Offensive Worldwide, you can pay third party companies Face join the simulation game pool where games are hosted on the 128-bit Faceit server. But they are standard servers for CS: GODoing the same for the game is a 64 point. AllowedThe 128 product servers to be standardized set themselves apart from other archers, but according to the development team, Riot never saw it as an option.
Acting executive producer Anna Donlon told Polygon, "I've never worked in a company where it was a no brainer to give 128 tick servers to players for free. It was like & # 39; already, we'll do that. & # 39;"
Servers are only as good as the connection the players have, though AllowedOur team has a plan for that too. According to Straily, the aim is for most players (around 70%) in startup markets, such as North America and Europe, to have latency less than 35 milliseconds (ms).
Latency is the time it takes your computer to send a message to a game server. In many games latency is simply a product of how far players are from servers and how strong their connection is. But because Allowed, Riot is spreading data centers around the world – including four in the United States – in the hope of creating as much consistency for as many players as possible.
While this should help keep latency low for most players, there will always be poorly connected players, but Riot is also taking a new approach.
Everyone played a shooter against the enemy with a bad lag. Jumping off the map, it looks like it's being sent from one location to the next.
In Allowed, a offline network player, will carry many of these difficulties. Instead of other players seeing them teleporting around, which makes it difficult to shoot, a bad-lucked player will see himself teleporting. In the meantime, the game server will complete the players' movements while trying to make them as smooth as possible. That way some players of the game can see and shoot them, or the evil person has trouble controlling their character.
In other words, if one person in the game has a bad connection, their movements should still seem normal to the other nine players. A person with a bad connection will be a simple target, without disrupting the experience of the other nine.
Another problem that is consistent with the type of shooter is the benefit of the skilled person. For most shooters, because of the way the computers interact with the server, the player who draws in the corner will have a split second where they can see the player who is beyond the corner, before that player can see them. While this can't be completely solved, Riot has managed to get it to a better place, where it doesn't give any player an important chance.
According to Straily, the development team has done some important research to try to find the right amount of time to require a peeker of profits to make a good encounter.
"We compared it to a team of very active and talented players in the studio," said Straily. "And we found that less than 80 miliseoconds are worth looking at our weapons and tasting. Not good, not good, but good,"
Thanks to the fact that the majority of players (also close to 70%) will have 35 ms latency and that the 128 tick servers, Straily says that the Riot team managed to get a chance to attract up to 60 ms in most cases.
According to the communications team, the peeker benefit was in the form of a goal post. If they can fix a peeker gain, or at least balance it, that would be a sign that everything else is in a good place.