this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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You need to account for every gap in the wall, nook and cranny and peephole for these sightlines. You'd have to bake so much detail into every calculation server side that it would effectively be rendering the entire map to host a single game.
There are many ways of doing this. I know the source engine uses visboxes, which are calculated once at map compile time. It takes a while to compile, but it means that clients can use the pre-compiled data to calculate parts of the map that are visible and the server can use them to determine what the player can see at a given time. I'm not sure whether it does that or not, but it would make sense to use that data.
It could be a client-side check with verification on the server. Basically transmitting which places are in view. Ray casting like the other person said. Not raytracing which is much more computationally intensive. A server side check basically so that the client can't just say they're looking around every corner at once.
But then you're adding extra latency to all visual calculations.
Your client needs to know if something is visible within the framerate of their PC.
You cannot do that fast enough.
Why not? More computationally intensive things are done to calculate lighting in a lot of modern games as I alluded to. Yes it would increase the load on your CPU but that's less of a problem nowadays with higher core counts and clock speeds and it's not like modern anticheats don't steal some CPU cycles already. I think you underestimate the power of modern computers. I'm not trying to be condescending here but it is worth remembering that gigahertz means BILLIONS of calculations per second.
We're only talking in theoreticals right now anyways, it is entirely possible that a game studio has tried this and it hasn't worked, I just don't put a lot of faith in modern game companies.
You cannot break the speed of light with computational effort.
You're saying that you want to have a round trip from client to server and back happen in-between frames.
You cannot do that. Period. You will not ever have latencies that low.
Even if you frame lock it at 60fps that means you're calculating views, sending the data up the tube, checking it on the server, responding back with all the data about the new character that should appear and then rendering the new guy within 17ms.
That is physically impossible.
That's why I already proposed tolerance for ~200ms with trajectory projections
So you're going to take all the places a character could be in the next 200ms, do Ray casting on all of them and send that data to the server to check every 17ms?
While the server also does that for 15 other players at the same time.
Do you know what algorithmic complexity is? Big O notation? If so - that's a n³ * 15m³ problem space that you're expanding out across 200ms every 17ms, where n is player locations possible in x/y/z and m is the other players locations. Physics collisions are usually the biggest drain on a computer's cycles in game and in the worst case that's n² complexity.
You're talking insanely taxing here.
It's mainly client side not server side. I'm not typing out an essay for you about a random ass idea I had one day on a forum.
I'm just baffled by the idea. No need to defend it though, this is all arbitrary anyways. It's not like anyone is going to do this.
True, I'm of the belief that gaming companies aren't too fussed about cheaters if they're bringing money in some way.