huginn @ huginn @feddit.it

Posts

0

Comments

1,131

Joined

2 yr. ago

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.

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.

There's no way in hell you'll ever get a game company to agree to that. You're talking 100x the expense of running a server at a minimum.

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.

My point was that you're multiplying server costs several times to do that complex rendering and still not solving the problem.

You do see why that's a serious issue right? Before the Server did nothing more than maintain a list of x,y,z coordinates of player positions. Now it's rendering the entire game space and doing 3d calculations.

That's several orders of magnitude more complex and costly.

You want a server to determine if a player should be visible (ie render each player's perspective) and then get that back to them right before someone walks around the corner? With latency you'd need to render people in at least 200ms before they appear... Which is still plenty of time for a hacker to flick to them and kill them.

Your suggesting the server maintain a real time render for every single player and somehow manage to get the data back to them in less than 17ms so that they don't have empty frames that suddenly become people?

Because that's a ludicrous requirement in terms of latency (ping is totally reasonable at any value under 100ms) and server capacity.

Because your solution sounds like it would cause popping constantly and be a major burden on the server, which is already the largest overhead on a released game.

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.

If you should absolutely be checking for repeat issues and basics. Not trying to excuse that shit, just saying server side isn't a silver bullet.

You constantly have to render people in when they can't be seen but will soon be seen. Which also means instead of keeping track of just locations the server needs to render the scene in sufficient detail as to determine sightlines.

Usually games just do this by sending info to clients of where everyone is and letting the clients render people in when the client determines that the sightline isn't interrupted.

Some games will just not send the positions until they're within a certain range of each other, but I'm a realistic game like tark you'd need several kilometers of info in case someone scoped in.

If you don't do this correctly it leads to characters popping into existence from thin air

It's easy to just handwaive and say "Server side will fix it" but here's a major issue:

You have to render people in before they appear. How do you do that without the client knowing where people are?

Yeah seems like we're just of different opinions there.

I firmly believe that American companies have excruciating detail on every single user, as well as most non-users. That's how they can do things like predict pregnancy before the rest of the family has been told...

And that was Target more than a decade ago.

And I also think, with ties to the Chinese govt

It's worth noting that ByteDance has a board that is 3/5ths American. The company has a communist committee like all Chinese megacorps.

China has blocked Youtube because it contained content around Free Tibet & Tienanmen Square. American Congress has decided to ban Tiktok because it might have content that China wants people to see (maybe). There is no credible reason why besides "No totally, trust me it's a problem".

Although, I do think them providing “better” service is subjective.

Sure, better is always subjective

But there's a reason it's way more popular for short form video than anyone else despite coming after them.

It’s basically vine, right? Vine had an “explore” page, right?

Sorta. It's short form video but vine was locked to 7 seconds. TT is anything up to 3 minutes.

But beyond vine: the "for you page" of Tiktok is an algorithmic beast unlike anything else. It is miles better at training to your likes than anyone else manages.

It seems like their main money plan besides ads is shopping. That's been their major push for a year or so now.

With social media companies and ad tech in general it's safe to assume that they're all merciless and cutthroat. They will do anything to profile you better, short of the existentially illegal shit (IE the company would cease to exist if they were caught. Think breaking into your house).

That's why it's always hilarious when people tout whatsapp being e2e encrypted

Based on reviews I've read there are some issues but it's a small dev team (1 man shop iirc) and it's the best medieval city builder since Banished according to reviews.

I was asked to relocate to Texas for a position when I was hired. I said no thanks and went to the NYC office instead.

I know I wasn't the only one to do this.

They were trying to hire in Austin and instead only found NYC talent. Tough break for them.

My point here is less that TikTok is totally cool with privacy (they're not)

It's that tiktok is just as invasive as all other mainstream social media but they provide a better service than any other social media.

That's it: They do more with the exact same.

You can drop instagram straight into that sentence and it reads the same. Except Facebook tracks you even when you don't have an account.

As soon as a user starts using Instagram, the company begins building a profile about them, including their interests, political leanings, sexuality, and every other variable that could impact the selection of videos they see.

Are you talking about the App Privacy page specifically?

Because that page is about as useful as "known to the State of California to cause cancer"

Any social media with advertising will have similar alerts as to what it might be collecting.

How would it be collecting that you might ask?

It's not on your phone: Your browser and your apps are sandboxed from each other. They cannot read from each other. It's a constant pain in the ass for session persistence, you end up having to use wonky nonce patterns to maintain sessions from app to browser & vice versa.

They're collecting it from advertising ids that are on your browser. It's the Google Ad Api - That's it.

Go ahead, look at Instagram or Youtube. They'll have the same laundry list of "Browsing history, Physical Address" etc.

TikTok isn't conjuring that from thin air - It's just that it, like any other advertising app, is using the publicly available data about you to advertise.

Again a side by side:

Which one is TikTok and which one is Instagram?

TikTok isn't doing anything that the other apps aren't also doing - The other apps are just fucking awful at knowing what you want to see.

Let's play a fun game:

Which of the following 2 screenshots is TikTok's permissions?

Is it the one that can prevent the phone from sleeping and runs at startup? The one that sends sticky broadcasts?

Or is it the one that accesses the AdId Api?

I'll give you a hint: I already told you which one it is.

The sheer amount of privileges TikTok requires on your device

The fuck are you on about?

Tiktok has a total of 0 granted permissions from me.

By default it has the same perms as other similar apps: Google Advertising ID.

That's it.

You can't opt out of that: it's Google.

If you give it a fuck load of perms that's your fault. By default it has less access than Discord.

You're just parroting bullshit you've heard elsewhere.

I'm a professional Android developer: Tiktok isn't requesting anything strange. It asks for camera, audio, and storage access when you record a video. That's exactly what you'd need to ask for: nothing more or less.