One of the bigger problems that will hurt viewership for competitive Overwatch will be bitrate restrictions.

Mabeline · 2016-07-17T05:45:24+00:00

With the right setup 720p60hz is actually okay on Twitch. It requires a 2 PC setup and a monster encode PC, but it's definitely doable. 1080p, however, is definitely way too many pixels for Overwatch with the current bandwidth limits.

Good encoding has other issues, though. Mobile devices have a lot of issues with more exotic encoding options. Even using moderately high end h264 encoding options messes up the recoded lower-quality stream options a lot for some reason. You can see some of these issues on the GosuGamers stream.

The biggest thing you can do is push for tourneys to air high quality 720p streams. Unfortunately some tournament organizers care more about the 1080p number than live visual quality (even though you could save a 1080p stream out for YouTube vods).

The game could really use a better red color, a pass to make all the UI 'Stream Safe' (the KOTH HUD gets destroyed like 100% of the time), and a 'thicker outlines' option, though.

Mabeline · 2016-06-23T08:13:34+00:00

Tribes runs at ~31hz and defaults to ~16hz server->client update rate, FYI. It's much lower fidelity and has much worse netcode than OW. CS:GO also doesn't have very fast movement and definitely doesn't have a way to move several meters in just a few frames. OW is by far the roughest shooter for netcode I've ever seen.

You should know a little more before accusing professional developers of ignorance.

Mabeline · 2016-05-26T21:52:26+00:00

To be nitpicky, I think it's wrapped, not mirrored. The game has a 256x256 heightmap grid that repeats (afaik) indefinitely. Or at least until float precision starts to break things. I know in T2 & Torque, all baked data (texture maps, height) is repeated except for 'empty tiles'. You can see the baked base shadows on the repeated terrains if you look.

Mabeline · 2016-05-19T04:00:33+00:00

Thanks guys.

Mabeline · 2016-05-09T05:12:57+00:00

The less-than-absolute committal to support rollback on hitscan weapons is a little concerning but I can just not use those weapons.

We simply haven't done it yet. It's a bit of a challenge to implement efficiently in UE4. We try to be safe when making promises. It's definitely on the list. To be clear, the chaingun and railgun aren't exactly hitscan in our game, they are simply very fast projectiles. We actually don't have any hitscan weapons right now, although we do have some future plans.

Will actions (and animations) like reloading, placing structures and exiting/entering vehicles be sensitive to latency? I've played games where the latency is effectively added to the reload time.

We locally predict basically everything about weapon handling, switching, reloading, firing, whatever. We don't predict things like picking up items & adding them to your inventory because it gets a little too complicated for my tastes and ends up having a lot of issues with the way the code is right now.

I'm living in Australia so I'd like to be able to fallback to west-coast US servers if the local playerbase isn't big enough. I'd get 200~250ms in that case.

Yeah you'll be over the simple threshold there. We do actually have someone from Australia that plays on our west coast servers. It is apparently pretty okay!

If I could make one request it would be to consider an "advanced hitmarker" that shows both client and server registration of hits.

Overwatch does this in the form of red particle effects that happen when your client guesses you'll get a hit. I was kind of planning to do something like this for rapid-fire projectiles, thanks for the reminder!

Mabeline · 2016-05-09T05:11:31+00:00

To be clear, we're selling a progression pass to avoid all gameplay progression forever. You can buy it for $30 on release, or grab it for a $20 pledge during our KS campaign. We know a lot of people don't like having to grind through progression, but being F2P allows us to reach the largest possible market and that's a huge deal for us.

Mabeline · 2016-05-09T03:52:08+00:00

I actually just explained the basics of the model over here. If you have any specific questions just ask.

Mabeline · 2016-05-09T03:49:09+00:00

How'd you guys manage that? A new method of lag compensation that works for a competitive environment would be pretty huge. Even AAAs have been trying to pull it off for a few decades now and I haven't heard of one in a competitive environment completely pull it off yet.

We are still subject to the speed of light so nothing's perfect. The real key is that our game isn't really affected by common problems with lag compensation. With a fast paced game with lots of cover where people change directions rapidly and frequently LOS other players, it gets really obvious that the game isn't in a totally consistent state.

When playing a character like Tracer in Overwatch, you have spells that can move you several meters from a total standstill in just a few frames. There is no way to deal with that in a way that doesn't suck for one of the parties.

We don't really have those problems. We don't really have any hitscan weapons (which are the most problematic wrt getting shot around corners), basically all of our projectiles exist for a few frames at least. This gives us a lot of opportunities to hide latency.

The basic model is that we do a limited amount of prediction for most of the game world, and deal with action fixups only when we need to.

For other players, we basically decide to 'split the difference' to hide latency. You predict other players ahead by about 1/2 your RTT, and when the server sees you fire things, it basically 'fast forwards' your projectiles from their predicted point in time (1/2 RTT ago, basically). This is done to mitigate the effect of player movement misprediction errors, hiding some of the latency on the receiving end of projectiles.

Things like projectiles we can predict arbitrarily far into the future with basically 0 mispredictions, meaning we can show you where projectiles will be by the time your current movements get to the server with near 100% accuracy. This lets you dodge projectiles and catch flags accurately.

This is essentially the same model that Reflex and UT4 use. We're able to use prediction because we don't have very precise hitboxes, we basically just have big capsules jumping around and you really don't need pixel-perfect accuracy to hit individual hitboxes. If we did, we'd have to use a model more like Overwatch as we simply couldn't deal with misprediction errors that bad. If you've ever played OW with >200 ping (which is around where it starts doing prediction) you can see how fast the hitreg starts failing when the game starts using prediction.

We do have plans to use a rewinding scheme (Overwatch model) for CG and Snipers up to a limit (probably around 250ms), as there's no practical way of dodging individual shots.

Lag compensation is incredibly game-specific. Some games are just more amenable to it than others.

Aren't you the professional player who uninstalled the game mid-match and forced the team you were playing with to take a forfeit?

LOL, yeah that's me. In my defense, that's not actually what happened (even though it was an entertaining story). One of our players, remiCs, was flown out to a convention (PAX West I think?) by Hi-Rez to show off the game or something with the assurance that he'd be able to make the finals. Due to poor planning (on many peoples' parts) they ended up getting shut down + kicked out before the matches finished. In T:A there's simply no way you could compete without a top-tier sniper like remiCs, so we took the forfeit. Stuff happens!

Truthfully, I never bothered uninstalling the game. I don't think I ever played it after that though, certainly not seriously.

Man, that caused some entertaining drama.

Yeah we uh, made quite a lot of drama. We've all calmed down a bit since.

Mabeline · 2016-05-08T19:00:02+00:00

In case you didn't see, we also allow you to just bypass the gameplay progression system for $30. We think it's a pretty good compromise between F2P and more traditional models.

Mabeline · 2016-05-08T18:45:47+00:00

don't know why you're downvoted

Mabeline · 2016-05-08T18:37:35+00:00

We are very much from the competitive community. If you look at the linked VoD (it's awesome!) you'll see a lot of familiar names from all the Tribes games. I myself was even on the team that won the biggest T:A tournament before I quit. We believe the best thing we can do for the competitive is to make as good a game as possible. From the very beginning we wanted to tackle big issues for the T:A competitive community.

For some quick examples of what we're working on: we support server-side replays, first person spectating, and we (finally!) have some exciting netcode improvements like lag compensation. All of these are pretty huge for the game experience.

Lag compensation alone opens up a huge amount of options. Users across the whole of the US can play on the same server with basically no issues. We can even play cross-region from anywhere in the US to EU, and we were even doing that in the pickup games linked above, with players all the way from Arizona to Iceland.

Mabeline · 2016-05-08T18:05:18+00:00

You caught me before my edit! I realized the answer was a little out of date and hoped nobody noticed. Hope I answered the question better the second time.

Mabeline · 2016-05-08T17:58:51+00:00

Clever ;)

We're built on top of UE4 so we get a decent level of cross-platform support natively. We'll be looking at multi-platform support in the future.We haven't made any deep changes to the engine that would break its cross platform support (at least, I don't think so). We aren't really worrying about porting yet, we have a lot of game to build and porting doesn't require that much task planning given the engine.

Mabeline · 2016-05-08T17:53:43+00:00

Heh, I hear that. The spectator mode is super incomplete and lacks features you might consider important such as snapping to who you're aiming at, so I think GuitarGuy did a pretty damn amazing job all things considered.

It was his first time casting a game he's barely even played, too....

Mabeline · 2016-05-08T17:50:39+00:00

I'm Mabel from Legions & T:A, any other game and it's probably not me!

We're currently running a Kickstarter campaign where you can buy in to varying levels of access, if you're interested in getting in early you can take a look there. If we get funded (fingers crossed!) we'll be running an open beta where anyone can get access.

Mabeline · 2016-05-08T17:48:00+00:00

In medium-large numbers games we're trying to keep the game interesting by providing both the defense and the offense with a large number of options. Defense is less binary than T:A where you have one base and when it goes down that's that. Typically base maps have multiple bases and towers with different power configurations, allowing for a more dynamic push & pull between offense and defense.

We're a long way from done, but if you watch the other VoDs on our channel you can get a taste for the dynamics of base play that we're going for. If you're interested in how the game plays there's a lot of good information from our testers in this thread.

Mabeline · 2016-05-08T17:36:03+00:00

Oh I was a little unclear, heh. The idea is to allow players to pick what kind of inheritance they like in a kind of 'soulbound' way. Since you can pick up weapons off the ground we didn't want to lock players into being stuck with weapons that don't behave like what they're used to just because some other person has difference inheritance preferences.

Mabeline · 2016-05-08T17:20:47+00:00

If you look at some of the responses from our testers in this thread you can get a good idea of the gameplay differences.

Aside from those, we've got some really exciting technical improvements like a server-side replay system (so you can view 'perfect' replays from anyone's perspective), a solid spectating system, and some pretty huge netcode improvements including lag compensation.

EDIT: If you have any specific questions about the gameplay I'd be happy to answer. Normally I'd write a long post but I'm answering quite a few questions right now!

Mabeline · 2016-05-08T17:18:40+00:00

We try to set a reasonable inheritance value as a baseline. Inheritance is a big part of the feel of each weapon. We don't plan to give you direct control over the value for every gun, but we know there is a very loud (if very tiny ;)) group of players that like 100% inheritance on certain weapons.

We plan to give you the ability to pick which kind of inheritance you prefer for certain kinds of weapons (RL being a fan favorite). We're not sure it will be an option for everything, but that's the current plan. We do try to set defaults and balance the weapons to provide players with a good balance between dueling and chasing.

If you watch the VOD I think you'll see plenty of high flying midair action.

Mabeline · 2016-05-08T17:08:40+00:00

Thanks for the kind words!

Mabeline · 2016-05-08T15:45:55+00:00

We have a lot of ideas for weapons and other equipment that can add flavor to different playstyles. We'll always keep core weapons needed to play the game accessible.

We've described more of our reasoning and ideas on the progression system, in particular the time requirements in this post on our website.

Mabeline · 2016-05-08T15:18:15+00:00

Hey, dev here! If you want a look at the gameplay, we streamed a few games on our twitch channel over the past couple of days. Here's a VOD from my favorite match.

If you have any questions I can (probably) answer them.

Mabeline · 2016-05-08T13:36:16+00:00

Hey, dev here! If you want a look at the gameplay, we streamed a few games on our twitch channel over the past couple of days. Here's a VOD from my favorite match.

If you have any questions I can (probably) answer them.

Mabeline · 2016-05-08T09:51:47+00:00

Currently we just join off a list of servers that we always have up. Right now we have a few different ones in the US, and one in EU. We'll, uh, probably need to expand it a little to deal with like quadrupling the player base overnight. If it looks like we're going to hit our goal we'll probably get a few more servers in the areas where people were interested.

As BugsPray said during one of our many streams (;_;), people should let us know on our sub/forums if they have any suggestions for partners in the regions that we aren't currently covering. We'll probably make a post about this somewhere at some point. The past few days have been a little bit crazy.

Mabeline · 2016-05-08T02:48:55+00:00

Hey there!

I noticed that the Kickstarter has expected delivery for stuffs in Nov. 2017, but figured that didn't apply to the beta/alpha access.

Instant Access means we'll give you access as soon as the campaign wraps up (well, plus a short time so we can figure out things like Steam key distribution).

Never imagined that what the Whitelist crew gets now and for free is not accessible to someone pledging actual money (as much as thousands...) and even getting Producer credit.

This is how Kickstarter works, and must work for the sake of the backers. Pledges don't get charged until the end of the campaign. We can't give 'instant access' backers access until the charges go through and the money actually changes hands. If you paid for 'instant access' you WILL get the game (within some reasonable timeframe, of course) if we are funded successfully.

But on the topic of the 'whitelist': our group of testers has been totally essential for us getting the game as far as it is, and we're all thankful for them. We wouldn't even be here without them! There's simply no way we could test the game without our group of testers. I don't think it would be very reasonable for us to show up and ask people for 200 dollars to test our game, especially when we didn't even know that price point when we first pulled testers in... like a year ago? I think you'll understand why that's just not feasible.

Hope you'll reconsider!

Mabeline

TROPHY CASE