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There has been lots of problems with observers lately: more observers increase the lag, and this create a rift between players who want to play lag free and tourmanents organizers who want more streams.
But having more observers *should* not increase the lag. I think in one of the patch, the UDP protocol was implemented for starcraft 2, and since you don't care about freeze/desync for observers, you could just send the data to the udp sockets for every observers. You would just use TCP for your opponent and an eventual referee.
(And since you don't expect data from the observers, you don't need to poll their sockets, so the latency should not change at all).
I am a bit surprised that Blizzard did not implement it that way, if they are serious about esport, the first thing that need to be done is a nice environment for online tournaments.
This is really the basic! I was actually expecting them to go further and offer a streaming environment like there was for WC3 with waaghtv or ggtv: you set up a relay obs that stream the data of the game to other clients. If players are worried about replays being leaked, you could set it up so that only clients with enough privilege can access to the data stream. Then these streamers can relay it through conventional video streams. This would allow for a more flexible approach, not having to wait for all the observers to come in the game. And since tournaments have to be endorsed by blizzard, this would make sense if they offer relay informations for endorsed tournaments in the sc2 lobby.
Another thing that should be implemented in order to prevent controversy is the ability to restart a game for a checkpointed position in a replay. This is the only manner to be completely fair in case of a disconnection of one of the player, and since there are checkpoints already this should not be hard to implement.
All in all I am a bit disappointed by the lack of feature for esports in SC2. Everyone is talking about the missing chat channels, but the preceding features are important too, and would help alleviate a lot of controversy. What do you think? Am I missing something?
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I have seen this done in other games, and SC2 with obs felt slower... And I knew they shouldn't really effect it, so that's probably why.
I am really speachless at the path that B.net is taking. It definetly is missing the most obvious and easy to implement feutures. So this leaves me to wonder, what's the problem:
-Blizz B.net staff aren't very educated
-Takes up too much to do, and rather work on something more important
-Do you really want chatrooms idea
Too much stuff is missing, and to be honest, Im starting to doubt the Blizz team. They are just so slow with implementing relatively easy things to do; from my perspective atleast. Another thing that bugs me, is they say they are listening to the community, but some of their decisions are unbearable.
Chatrooms, I cannot understand why they wouldn't implement something so easy... I just feel their dodging some really important things. Maybe I just don't know anything, but many others have an opinion like me.
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War3 I loved joining random OBS games as well. It was a fun way to tell some jokes while watching some good players. However this feature is another issue with the custom map setup.Battle net has a long way to go.
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Yeah, i agree that the current system where if an observer lags it slows down the game is really poor. It even happened during the TLO vs MadFrog showmatch.
I can only imagine that the engine doesn't allow for it. It would be a huge improvement if they could resolve the issue
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This thread needs some love from R1CH.
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I agree that observers should not lag games especially tournament ones by all means. I remember there was a pic of GOMTV Dcing in a tournament match around here lol.
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what SC2 needs is first party implemented WAAAAGHTV.
No discussion.
This would solve everything, unlimited DELAYED streams, so your opponent can't cheat.
Everybody could watch the game themselves without streams and opponents wouldn't notice any lag.
But hey they rather implement name changes, coz you can charge for that.
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On August 17 2010 11:06 Kexx wrote:
what SC2 needs is first party implemented WAAAAGHTV.
No discussion.
This would solve everything, unlimited DELAYED streams, so your opponent can't cheat.
Everybody could watch the game themselves without streams and opponents wouldn't notice any lag.
But hey they rather implement name changes, coz you can charge for that.
Its a business like any other sadly, money comes first. Maybe they're on to it but progress has been slow? :S
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Very good suggestion but I don't think blizzard's BNET team will go for it because they're idiots.
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On August 17 2010 11:06 Kexx wrote:
what SC2 needs is first party implemented WAAAAGHTV.
No discussion.
This would solve everything, unlimited DELAYED streams, so your opponent can't cheat.
Everybody could watch the game themselves without streams and opponents wouldn't notice any lag.
I am pretty sure we will see it, if not from Blizzard, at last from a third party addon. Name change is really easy to implement, and the no-delay from observers, or start a game from a replay should only be a bit harder. I am really hopping to see that soon.
Chat channel and a waaaghtv-like system are a bit harder, so I don't mind not having it right now, but this definitely should be implemented some time in the future. Of course, there would still be a need for Video streaming for the casual public and those who want to watch matches without having sc2.
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I have to agree that this is a problem, as occasionally everyone's connection hiccups. It's embarrassing when a caster lags his players' games. If you're streaming 4 hours or more at a time, at some point in that stream you are almost certainly going to have a brief problem. There should absolutely be a method of relaying information to a spectator without affecting the players in the match.
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If you got disconnected, what happened in BW? At the moment, we also have no LAN so even if you played close, you still relied on battle.net to be stable.
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I agree with everything the OP said. While I'm no programmer this seems to me like it might be more difficult to implement than it sounds, and frankly there are a lot of bnet features that are still glaringly missing. (chat channels anyone?)
But still the bottom line is that this should have been designed this way from the beginning. But that's unfortunately what you get when you put the Xbox live guy in charge of a PC gaming platform.
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It unbelievable that Blizzard has spent so much on this game and yet battle.net 2.0 is terrible.
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At some point Blizzard has to make it so observers can not cause lag, because OP is pretty much correct. However, the bnet dev team seems to be understaffed, underfunded, or just pretty bad at design/programming, and the easiest way to make the game "just work" is to sync everyone involved in a game.
It's a safe assumption that this will eventually be fixed, however.
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i wish there was a way to play ladder and a friend could observe the match(your view only), just by rightclicking on your name and going to join game, or by being in your party while u start 1v1 ladder. Would be a good way to train people and entertaining and better than watching a stream.
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They should try to implement something like HLTV.
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12519 Posts
Agreed with OP: 1. Observing made lag-less. 2. Resume game from replay.
Moreover, it is possible to re-stream the game environment itself, not just video, so that everyone at home gets to view the game live as they wish to control the camera. If it is a must to not share replays, still some limited game environment without players hotkeys and players view could be available.
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On September 06 2010 09:34 figq wrote:
Agreed with OP: 1. Observing made lag-less. 2. Resume game from replay.
Moreover, it is possible to re-stream the game environment itself, not just video, so that everyone at home gets to view the game live as they wish to control the camera. If it is a must to not share replays, still some limited game environment without players hotkeys and players view could be available.
to your second point. shouldnt be such a big problem. the game could send all the data stream to its server with a pid. and people who connected to that pid recieve the data and therefore the "game". some kind of realtime replay.
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The people working on bnet aren't understaffed or underfunded--they just have the wrong priorities :\ If their director pointed them in the right direction they could crank this stuff out.
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From a design standpoint, the reason you can't let laggy observers get de-synced in a game is because each packet (it doesn't matter if it's tcp or udp) only contains *updates* to the game status and not the complete game status. If an observer or player were to get de-synced, resyncing them would require that you send the complete status of the game to that computer, which could be a major strain on the server, not to mention the packet would be massive and a pain in the ass to process. It's basically the same reason you can't skip ahead in a replay (because the replay only contains commands and updates, not the complete game status for any given point) or join a game in progress.
With all that said, I don't see why they can't just cache the packets when an observer lags, and let the game continue. When the observer stops lagging, just send them everything they missed and let the client catch up. Aside from the increased server memory footprint issues (to cache the previous X seconds worth of packets), this seems like it should be possible, as replays can process updates at up to 6x speed with no problems.
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On August 17 2010 08:54 Skillz_Man wrote:
I have seen this done in other games, and SC2 with obs felt slower... And I knew they shouldn't really effect it, so that's probably why.
I am really speachless at the path that B.net is taking. It definetly is missing the most obvious and easy to implement feutures. So this leaves me to wonder, what's the problem:
-Blizz B.net staff aren't very educated
-Takes up too much to do, and rather work on something more important
-Do you really want chatrooms idea
Too much stuff is missing, and to be honest, Im starting to doubt the Blizz team. They are just so slow with implementing relatively easy things to do; from my perspective atleast. Another thing that bugs me, is they say they are listening to the community, but some of their decisions are unbearable.
Chatrooms, I cannot understand why they wouldn't implement something so easy... I just feel their dodging some really important things. Maybe I just don't know anything, but many others have an opinion like me.
You need to understand chat rooms aren't just write a few lines of code in an afternoon and be done with it. It DOES take time and honestly, I don't care enough about chat rooms for a delayed release.
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The observers DO send data back. As an observer (Or in replays) You can switch to the view of one of the other observers in the game. I think this is a great feature so it should stay 
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On September 06 2010 10:36 aike wrote:The observers DO send data back. As an observer (Or in replays) You can switch to the view of one of the other observers in the game. I think this is a great feature so it should stay
Yeah, but they still don't need to be synchronized to (= can create lag for) the players.
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Tournaments just need to be less obsessed with having 5 or more obs in a tournament game. There only needs to be 1 to get the spectator replay, and maybe 1 for the referee. Any more than that is just overkills.
Any tournament that streams as they obs a game doesn't realize how easy it would be to cheat as a player. All you'd have to do is have a laptop with the streaming site open, bam there wouldn't be any way to prove you were watching.
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The only problem I really see are the sheer amount of people observing. There's no need for 6+ obsers at all, and I can understand a player getting frustrated at that. 1 admin, 2 casters, 1 streamer seems like it would be a good limit.
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On September 06 2010 10:43 tok wrote:
Tournaments just need to be less obsessed with having 5 or more obs in a tournament game. There only needs to be 1 to get the spectator replay, and maybe 1 for the referee. Any more than that is just overkills.
Exactly.
While yes, the current system on battle.net is pretty bad and I can't really say anything good about battle.net, I think tournament admins should step up and just decide on 1-2 official streamers (anyone else who would want to stream, should just restream it) or just start casting the replays.
HDH and king of the beta tournament were both replay casts, and I'm pretty sure there aren't many people that thinks the tournament was less fun because it was replays and not live.
When I watch a tournament where there's suddenly like 15 observers in a game I really feel sorry for the players.
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On September 06 2010 10:21 PeRk wrote:
You need to understand chat rooms aren't just write a few lines of code in an afternoon and be done with it. It DOES take time and honestly, I don't care enough about chat rooms for a delayed release.
i write you the code for a chatroomsystem with few lines of code in one afternoon....
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On September 06 2010 10:16 Badred wrote:
From a design standpoint, the reason you can't let laggy observers get de-synced in a game is because each packet (it doesn't matter if it's tcp or udp) only contains *updates* to the game status and not the complete game status.
Yes, I agree with that, but packet losses are very rare. Usually what happen with UDP is that the packets do not arrive in the same order, or that one packet take a long time to arrive, but it will rarely get loss. For a player waiting for a packet is a blocking point, it is usually faster to request a new packet, but this is not a problem for an observer. As you said, this can be handled by a cache (and the cache need only to be at the user level if we don't care about packet loss), in fact there is probably a cache already implemented to handle packets arriving in the wrong order.
Now if there is a packet loss, the observer will de-sync, but usually this happen when the network condition is so bad that the observer will create lag anyway if he stays. To be fair I never wrote huge multiplayer project using udp, so I may be wrong about this, but in my experience udp packets eventually do arrive (except when there are some problem with the MTU and thus but it will be detected at the IP level anyway).
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On September 06 2010 10:21 PeRk wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2010 08:54 Skillz_Man wrote:
I have seen this done in other games, and SC2 with obs felt slower... And I knew they shouldn't really effect it, so that's probably why.
I am really speachless at the path that B.net is taking. It definetly is missing the most obvious and easy to implement feutures. So this leaves me to wonder, what's the problem:
-Blizz B.net staff aren't very educated
-Takes up too much to do, and rather work on something more important
-Do you really want chatrooms idea
Too much stuff is missing, and to be honest, Im starting to doubt the Blizz team. They are just so slow with implementing relatively easy things to do; from my perspective atleast. Another thing that bugs me, is they say they are listening to the community, but some of their decisions are unbearable.
Chatrooms, I cannot understand why they wouldn't implement something so easy... I just feel their dodging some really important things. Maybe I just don't know anything, but many others have an opinion like me.
You need to understand chat rooms aren't just write a few lines of code in an afternoon and be done with it. It DOES take time and honestly, I don't care enough about chat rooms for a delayed release.
It takes soooo much time that they've been implemented since 1997.
Are you serious?
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All in all I am a bit disappointed by the lack of feature for esports in SC2. Everyone is talking about the missing chat channels, but the preceding features are important too, and would help alleviate a lot of controversy. What do you think? Am I missing something?
The point is that Blizzard does not care about the best product possible, or the community. They care about making money. The only time they are going to DO something for us is when the complaining reaches the major gaming sites like IGN as news, then they will do something for PR. There are literally hundreds of enhancements that could be done quite easily and take very little time, it's just that Blizzard's project leads do not care. Greg Canessa had a vision, that was shown at Blizzcon. He created his vision, and that's what we are stuck with.
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On September 06 2010 10:36 aike wrote:The observers DO send data back. As an observer (Or in replays) You can switch to the view of one of the other observers in the game. I think this is a great feature so it should stay
Oh, I was not aware of that, thanks for mentioning it.
On September 06 2010 10:40 butterbrain wrote:
Yeah, but they still don't need to be synchronized to (= can create lag for) the players.
Yes, you can either sync all observers with different informations from the player (but this would be a mess), or just let the laggy oberver lag/desync (so his view would lag/desync correspondingly). There would no really be a need for a cache by observer, if they send only information about where their screen is and their selection, you don't care if you lose some of their packets.
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On September 06 2010 10:57 skeldark wrote:Show nested quote +On September 06 2010 10:21 PeRk wrote:
You need to understand chat rooms aren't just write a few lines of code in an afternoon and be done with it. It DOES take time and honestly, I don't care enough about chat rooms for a delayed release. i write you the code for a chatroomsystem with few lines of code in one afternoon....
Oh please, if battle.net launched with a chat room like that people would just complain. Saying chat rooms have been around for years is a stupid argument.
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Someone already mentioned, but CS 1.6 and CSS have HLTV.. anyone can just jump into a game and watch no lag created for the players at all, and CSS is 6 years old now .. and 1.6 is well.. c'mon. it's ancient and they can provide good observation no problem.
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On September 06 2010 10:54 Ighox wrote:
While yes, the current system on battle.net is pretty bad and I can't really say anything good about battle.net, I think tournament admins should step up and just decide on 1-2 official streamers (anyone else who would want to stream, should just restream it) or just start casting the replays.
Yes, but for tourmanents officials, more streamer = more publicity, IEM explicitely said they let lot of streamers in the beta for publicity, and that now they are known they will restrict the amount of streamers. And since the audience for sc2 is international, it makes sense to have at least a streamer by region (NA, Europe, Asia). Anyway the best solution would be to have a way to relay the game data (it would take less bandwith than a video stream while retaining the same liberty as a conventional observer). I am pretty sure they will be implemented sooner or later, just we may have not to count on blizzard for that...
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On September 06 2010 11:09 PokePill wrote:Show nested quote +All in all I am a bit disappointed by the lack of feature for esports in SC2. Everyone is talking about the missing chat channels, but the preceding features are important too, and would help alleviate a lot of controversy. What do you think? Am I missing something? The point is that Blizzard does not care about the best product possible, or the community. They care about making money. The only time they are going to DO something for us is when the complaining reaches the major gaming sites like IGN as news, then they will do something for PR. There are literally hundreds of enhancements that could be done quite easily and take very little time, it's just that Blizzard's project leads do not care. Greg Canessa had a vision, that was shown at Blizzcon. He created his vision, and that's what we are stuck with.
How long have you been around? Obviously not very long if that's how you feel...
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On September 06 2010 09:58 theqat wrote:
The people working on bnet aren't understaffed or underfunded--they just have the wrong priorities :\ If their director pointed them in the right direction they could crank this stuff out.
Yep, there are several small yet useful features that could be added to BNet & replays that would make the experience much more enjoyable.
For instance, as you already know, the custom game lobby is pretty much unusable. This is much a sacrilege IMO. I'm not huge on competitve play myself because I'm bad at the game but I love obs'ing random games (at least, I did in WC3) or playing custom maps. Both of these are impossible at the moment unless I want to play the same 25 maps all the time. This simple feature is what kept me playing SC and WC3 years after I had gotten bored with melee games. At this rate I will only be buying the games for single player and the rest of the time I can watch streams without owning the game...
In addition : You can't hide replay time. You can't slow down replays (yet you could in beta...). You can't make a private game. Observers slowing down games (well, obviously since that is the point of the thread).
Nevermind chat rooms, these are just as important IMO and relatively easy to implement.
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On September 06 2010 11:51 PH wrote:Show nested quote +On September 06 2010 11:09 PokePill wrote:All in all I am a bit disappointed by the lack of feature for esports in SC2. Everyone is talking about the missing chat channels, but the preceding features are important too, and would help alleviate a lot of controversy. What do you think? Am I missing something? The point is that Blizzard does not care about the best product possible, or the community. They care about making money. The only time they are going to DO something for us is when the complaining reaches the major gaming sites like IGN as news, then they will do something for PR. There are literally hundreds of enhancements that could be done quite easily and take very little time, it's just that Blizzard's project leads do not care. Greg Canessa had a vision, that was shown at Blizzcon. He created his vision, and that's what we are stuck with. How long have you been around? Obviously not very long if that's how you feel...
Been around what? TL/SC2? ~ 3 Years
Blizzard Games? ~10 years
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bnet 2.0 《--- ╭∩╮（︶︿︶）╭∩╮
I await the day that some major sc2 final gets DDOS. Forcing online only is a major fail.
User was warned for this post
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B.Net 2.0 is realy un reliable atm so i there doesn't have to be so many observers in a tournament match. but yea i hope Blizz patches this up ASAP i DC'd 4 times yesterday
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On September 06 2010 11:00 gondolin wrote:Show nested quote +On September 06 2010 10:16 Badred wrote:
From a design standpoint, the reason you can't let laggy observers get de-synced in a game is because each packet (it doesn't matter if it's tcp or udp) only contains *updates* to the game status and not the complete game status.
To be fair I never wrote huge multiplayer project using udp, so I may be wrong about this, but in my experience udp packets eventually do arrive (except when there are some problem with the MTU and thus but it will be detected at the IP level anyway).
UDP packets are not guaranteed to arrive - that's exactly why it's "faster" than TCP: there's no confirmation of packet arrival sent back to the sender. TCP will keep sending the packet until it receives confirmation of it's arrival, while UDP just sends once and assumes it got there. It's possible, and indeed likely, that some UDP packets will never arrive. Any sort of guaranteed delivery in UDP would have to be manually coded into the software (or use some sort of library that handles that for you).
Really the protocol used isn't the issue. The actual amount of *latency* between the two protocols is the roughly the same as long as you're not dropping too many packets, it's just that TCP just requires slightly more bandwidth and has more overhead (as does UDP if you're using the aforementioned libraries to ensure delivery).
This page has a fairly good analysis of the two protocols: http://www.devmaster.net/wiki/UDP_vs_TCP
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Good post. Still, I'm afraid Blizzard will not do it.
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isnt this exactly the same as huk's thread?
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On September 06 2010 14:26 Badred wrote:
UDP packets are not guaranteed to arrive - that's exactly why it's "faster" than TCP: there's no confirmation of packet arrival sent back to the sender. TCP will keep sending the packet until it receives confirmation of it's arrival, while UDP just sends once and assumes it got there. It's possible, and indeed likely, that some UDP packets will never arrive. Any sort of guaranteed delivery in UDP would have to be manually coded into the software (or use some sort of library that handles that for you).
Yes, I know they can not arrive, but usually they just get delayed, and arrive in the wrong order. The packet get loss when one router is overloaded with data and start dropping packet. As I have said, in my experiments, this happened very rarely, but that was because it was through a local network, with not saturated routers. I can guess than in a multiplayer game like scII, the packets will go through more congestionned routes, and they can be lost more easily.
If you have some data about the rate of packet loss using udp via internet (rather than an intranet), I would be interested.
The actual amount of *latency* between the two protocols is the roughly the same as long as you're not dropping too many packets, it's just that TCP just requires slightly more bandwidth and has more overhead (as does UDP if you're using the aforementioned libraries to ensure delivery).
Yes, but the point with udp is that you can just send the datagram and don't care to what they do afterward. If you are sending them to observers, you don't care if they lose some packets and desync (if that happen rarely). And if they lag you don't notice it at all. With tcp the reliability is implemented on the os tcp stack, so you can't do the same thing.
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On September 06 2010 14:49 Subversion wrote:
isnt this exactly the same as huk's thread?
My post is from earlier, and is more focused on providing a technical solution to the observer problem.
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Kyrgyz Republic1462 Posts
On September 06 2010 19:41 gondolin wrote:
Yes, I know they can not arrive, but usually they just get delayed, and arrive in the wrong order.
The protocol does not guarantee that all the packets will arrive, so you cannot just tie the functionality of your software to what "usually" happens in perfect conditions.
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Australia1608 Posts
With Cataclysm beta going on Blizzard is probably more worried about their gift that keeps on giving, WoW..
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Good idea, won't be implemented, sorry. B.net staff/Blizzard just doesn't give a hoot and you know it.
If LAN, cross-region play, and chat channels were done away with for no reason whatsoever (don't you dare say piracy or spammers as that can be easily dealt with by authentication/banning) why would they bother with rewriting code just so you and few other nerds get lag free games? Since the majority (read: Casual gamers) are happy and are still buying the game they don't see a need for wasting money on modifying anything or implementing any features that have been overlooked or plain butchered from the start. Our opinion simply doesn't command enough market presence for them to bat an eye at our displeasure.
Also, instead of working on a released game that is still selling well, they're main focus now is on WoW Cataclysm which will bring them far far far greater revenues than SC2.
The point at which these threads and/or complaints would of made a difference was during the BETA but every similar thread with a legitimate complaint (read: not MBS/Smart Cast) was bombarded by Blizzard fanboys who would flame thread starters for whining and preach about how the game was still in BETA and that the release version would have any and all problems fixed and dealt with. They were wrong and now we have a multitude of problems on our hands that won't be dealt with any time soon.
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EPT
