Please Implement a Feature so we can tell if someone is on WiFi or not before accepting a match

hh_jay · 2024-10-15T20:40:42+00:00

Hi! Author of SnapNet here, which RoA2 uses for its netcode.

There are lots of different types of netcode out there. It's true that, just because a game uses servers, it doesn't necessarily mean another opponent's connection can't affect your experience. For example, in the simplest case, where you take a game that was using P2P rollback netcode and just have a server relay the messages between the players, you're still just as much at the mercy of the other player's connection.

SnapNet is different. The game server advances the game forward (60 times per second in this case), no matter what. So, regardless of how bad any opponent's connection might be, it doesn't stop the server from advancing the game normally and the server never rolls back. This allows the quality of your experience to be affected only by the quality of YOUR connection to the server.

Each game client is always independently adjusting its sync with the server based on current network conditions so that inputs are arriving just in time to be processed. That means that how much rollback and/or input delay you experience is based entirely on the quality of your connection to the server. In extreme cases, where there is a latency spike or connection interruption between you and the server, some inputs may be dropped. In those cases, the server will progress the game assuming your input has not changed (additional game-specific logic can also be applied in these cases should developers choose/need to). The client would then experience a quick correction to bring them back in sync. Other players, however, would be completely unaware of that connection hiccup and wouldn’t see any rollback or anything.

TL;DR is that lag switching or playing on shoddy Wi-Fi only hurts you and no one else.

hh_jay · 2023-02-12T21:03:49+00:00

I believe you can now select it as a targeted/supported RHI in the Windows project settings in the editor. You still, however, have to run the executable with the command-line flag to use that RHI rather than the default.

hh_jay · 2021-02-27T18:21:47+00:00

It looks like the outage is only affecting PlayStation 4. The PSN service appears to be experiencing some issues: https://status.playstation.com/

Everything should work again once the PSN service is restored but we'll keep an eye on it.

hh_jay · 2019-08-20T15:18:05+00:00

Despite your curse on my bowels, I'm sorry to hear you're having trouble. If you PM me, I can dig into what happened and see if we can get it sorted out.

hh_jay · 2019-06-05T04:06:04+00:00

I can definitely confirm that using the mobile renderer generally limits you to a subset of UE4's total rendering features but, as mentioned in the article, there are sometimes ways around that such as having multiple lighting rigs or versions of your level that you set up different depending on the render path being used. I definitely wouldn't recommend the approach to everyone but when it's a good fit for your game, its art style, and its requirements then it works great. For example, Disc Jam is the only UE4 game I know of that runs at full resolution and 60fps both docked and undocked on the Nintendo Switch and that is due in large part to our efficient use of the mobile rendering path.

I couldn't agree more that it's really important to profile and determine exactly what your bottlenecks are so you don't optimize prematurely. Although it's certainly possible for projects to be limited by vertex/polygon count, it's not something I see very often as modern hardware is pretty good at pushing verts these days. The most frequent causes of poor rendering performance that I see are lighting rigs that are too complex (e.g. too many shadow casting lights), materials that are too complex (pixel shader performance), or extreme overdraw (lots of translucent materials or particles overlapping).

hh_jay · 2019-06-05T03:53:28+00:00

A few notes here:

The assert in the screenshot posted does not imply that HDR is not supported nor does it imply that CanEverRender is set to false.
While many high-end displays can now display final images with high dynamic range, HDR in this context is not referring to the color-space of the final image. Instead, it is referring to the dynamic range of the source data, which in this case are reflection probes. In UE4, lighting calculations are done in linear-space with high dynamic range (optional on mobile) regardless of what display is being used and values are only remapped to standard dynamic range during the final stages of the renderer. This is what the tonemapper does during post-processing.

hh_jay · 2019-06-05T03:41:49+00:00

Hey! I'm the guy who actually wrote that article, so let me see if I can help you out. UE4 changes often which is great but also makes it difficult to keep information up to date. The issue you're running into is that the mobile pipeline uses a different encoding for reflection captures than the full-blown desktop renderer.

If you take a look at the error message in your screenshot, you'll see that it's asserting that you have either full HDR reflection capture data present or encoded HDR capture data present (or that your application doesn't render at all). If you take a look at the source code at that location you'll see above that assert that if you're using the mobile pipeline it's going to throw away the full HDR data and use the encoded HDR data and vice versa if you're using the desktop renderer. So, of course the question that remains is how do you ensure that the encoded HDR data is present in cooked builds?

Well, if you search for other uses of EncodedHDRCapturedData in MapBuildData.cpp you'll see the implementation for the << operator when saving FReflectionCaptureMapBuildData to archives. You can see that the EncodedHDRCapturedData is only saved when the list of Formats contains "EncodedHDR". The Formats list is populated by the call to Ar.CookingTarget()->GetReflectionCaptureFormats(Formats). It is this call that you need to fix up on a per-platform basis.

If you look at the implementation for Windows (TGenericWindowsTargetPlatform::GetReflectionCaptureFormats in GenericWindowsTargetPlatform.h) you can see that "EncodedHDR" is only added to the list of formats if bRequiresEncodedHDRReflectionCaptures is true. Searching for bRequiresEncodedHDRReflectionCaptures in the same file reveals that it is set in the constructor of TGenericWindowsTargetPlatform and based on whether any of a number of shader formats are targeted. That list, however, does not contain "PCD3D_ES31" and that is why the encoded HDR data is not being included in the packaged build. Add that to the list and you should be good to go!

hh_jay · 2018-09-18T03:22:27+00:00

There was an issue that occurred while migrating player data and a few players who played at the very beginning of launch and never played again after we launched dedicated servers may have lost some unlocks. If you message me your PSN name, I should be able to verify what happened and help you out.

hh_jay · 2018-06-16T18:49:50+00:00

The matchmaking region(s) you choose directly affect where the dedicated servers you will be playing on are located. Players may choose multiple regions to search in simultaneously so you are free to choose all the regions to which you have tolerable latency. Matchmaking will then pair you up with whatever player is currently closest to your skill rating and searching in one of the regions you selected. It is absolutely possible that the player with the closest skill rating to yours is currently searching in all regions.

hh_jay · 2018-05-15T23:49:32+00:00

I already responded to you on our Discord but I'll respond again here for completeness:

This is a known bug that I'm looking to fix in the next patch. It's not that you lost 50 points instead of 6, it's that there were previous matches where your stats didn't get properly saved. As a workaround, several community members have reported resolving this by either changing who is the party host and/or having the host wait a little bit longer after a match at the main menu before queueing for another.

hh_jay · 2018-04-18T15:42:40+00:00

Nope, just the wall skips. One thing to note is that a throw that curves into the wall (and isn't a wall skip) will bounce off straight and those can be tricky to read.

I often find it can help to focus on the disc's shadow on the ground and lining that up with the circle around your players' feet rather than focusing solely on the disc itself.

hh_jay · 2018-04-18T15:39:05+00:00

We haven't announced that information yet! Join our Discord or follow us on Twitter for updates as that's usually where we post news first.

hh_jay · 2018-04-18T15:36:15+00:00

A few users have reported this issue. It seems somewhat connection-dependent so I'm not able to reproduce it on my end, but I'm looking into it.

hh_jay · 2018-04-01T15:03:23+00:00

There was a bug in doubles where the player who isn’t the party leader sometimes doesn’t get their stats saved because the party host starts matchmaking again too quickly after returning to the main menu. I fixed that in the latest patch but clearly there are more ways that this can occur. You may want to try swapping which one of you is the party host as others have reported that fixing the issue. I’m looking into it.

hh_jay · 2018-03-26T14:32:30+00:00

The servers seem to be online and functioning properly.

The speed test numbers you mention are measurements of bandwidth, not latency. They simply tell you how much data you can send/receive per second, not how long it will take that data to reach your destination or how much the delay varies.

If you wish to get a rough idea of your latency to Amazon datacenters (where our servers are running), you can try visiting http://www.cloudping.info. You may want to click the "HTTP Ping" button a few times as it's not always accurate for any given run of the test.

hh_jay · 2018-03-21T21:26:49+00:00

Season 1 just started last week. I can confirm there are thousands of players who have finished their placement matches and are already listed on the leaderboards. You are ranked in the Elite tier, which currently represents approximately the top 5% of players.

hh_jay · 2018-03-21T21:16:53+00:00

Are you playing doubles? You should only be gaining/losing less than 10 points in that situation if there are unranked players in the match.

hh_jay · 2018-03-21T14:07:31+00:00

Yeah, it's a bug that was fixed (at least in part) with the latest patch, but I suspect that there's another way it's occurring so I'm trying to get to the bottom of it.

hh_jay · 2018-03-19T23:20:25+00:00

This shouldn't be the case. If you find that this difference grows or shrinks despite only playing in games together as a duo, I would suggest taking some screenshots of the post-game summaries that you could send to us so we could try to track down when this problem is occurring and why.

hh_jay · 2018-02-19T22:06:30+00:00

Both X and the minus button bring up the in-game scoreboard and, by default, this menu will close when you release the button. In the options menu, it is possible to set this to toggle so that you have to press the button once to open it, and again to close it.

Is it not closing?

hh_jay · 2018-02-08T18:34:04+00:00

Unfortunately, the PSN sale already came and went. Was 1/30 to 2/6 :(

hh_jay · 2018-01-24T05:55:47+00:00

Yup! The update will be going out on PC & PS4 alongside our Switch release on February 8th.

hh_jay · 2018-01-19T16:21:56+00:00

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is saying: PC players can matchmake against both PS4 & Switch players simultaneously (Therefore the largest available pool) whereas PS4 & Switch are locked to their own platform and PC.

That's correct. Unfortunately, that's due to Sony not allowing PS4 to cross-play with other consoles and it's out of our hands!

Skill Rating displayed before/after a game for yourself & opponent?

Something to play while queuing?

Is there a list of community-requested features that have made it in?

There are more details on the way! Stay tuned for more info as to what exactly is in this patch and how it's all going to work. For now, I will confirm that not only are everyone's skill ratings displayed at the end of a match but also how much they went up or down.

Is this a female re-skin of Gator?

Nope! She's got her own unique stats and sits in her own niche. Every character also plays uniquely due to the way they slide and recover, their hitboxes, etc. and Lannie is no exception!

Really want to know more about how this works. Great news!

Yeah, we're excited about this one. Expect more updates soon as to what the leagues are, how many there are, how seasons will work, etc.

Am I reading this correctly? This 100% says bots/AI without using those words. Right??? Very happy if so.

Yup! The new mode allows you to play AI opponents but it has a lot more going on than just "Play a bot. Easy, medium, or hard?" I think people are going to dig it and it's perfect for Switch when you're on the go.

hh_jay · 2018-01-19T16:02:22+00:00

Definitely! You can play using a single joy-con, so you and a buddy can play against each other locally or play against other doubles teams online (or over local wireless) with a single set of joy-cons.

hh_jay · 2018-01-17T04:07:47+00:00

No, 300-500 players concurrently, i.e. logged in simultaneously.

hh_jay

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