I don’t, this has never been a possibility for me in the last 4/5 houses I’ve lived unless I specifically bought a 3m long USB cable. I’m sure plenty of people do, but I don’t think it’s 99%.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I like the idea of AA because if the controller dies mid-session you can just swap them and keep playing, on the other this is easily solvable by having a dock like the 8BitDo Ultimate, which makes it so that the controller is always fully charged when you pick it up, so the only advantage that the AA had disappears, and it’s even more comfortable to have the controller always charged than having to get up in the middle of the play session to find new batteries. And the Steam controller has a charging puck, so it should never have the issue where AA are better. So my feeling that it would be better is not justified.

The other supposed advantage is longevity, since all batteries eventually die off, if it’s an external battery you just buy new ones and are done. Being internal makes it more of a hassle. But Valve has been very open with the repaiedness of their devices, so I expect this to not be a big issue, as long as the batteries are still being manufactured by the time the one in the controller dies off (which should take a lot more time to happen than regular AA).

A couple of things, first no, I don’t feel the latency of a Bluetooth controller. But also the steam controller will be able to pair to multiple devices, in one of the interviews one of the engineers said “The steam Machine has its own antena, but each controller comes with its own puck, we expect the common use case to be to plug that to your PC and use the steam controller in both devices”

If an enemy is outside your vision, but makes a noise, you cannot give that information to the client without revealing the enemies position.

Sure you can, for starters audio is a lot less reliable to pinpoint location than video, so the server can randomize the position somewhat and still be accurate enough. Not to mention that sound bounces off walls, so it’s not exactly wrong to give the point of origin of a sound as a wall nearby the origin or destination, and an even more advanced system could use ray tracing to calculate sound path and give you a fully accurate sound point that doesn’t reveal the source exactly.

If a player kicks a bucket across the map, the bucket flying through your screen makes it trivially easy to calculate the point of origin - and you know something happened there / player was there.

But again if you’re not sending the bucket position until it’s in FoV that doesn’t matter at all.

We’d be really really lucky if server side fog of war would be the kill-it-all solution to cheating.

It’s not the end all, but it does take are of whole categories of hacks.

I’ll reply to the server FoV there. Skill based matchmaking is hard to solve, but I think most games who have enough players to worry about anti-cheat to this level should have some level of skill based matchmaking in place, in my head that’s way more important than anti-cheat because even with cheaters the games are fun for everyone, and cheaters end up bubbling up into their own group.

Well, yes, but, let me counter with this:

You can completely remove wall hacks from the equation by doing some FoV calculations in the server, this completely solves that issue, there’s no client side hack that would be able to show you enemies behind the wall because the server isn’t sending them to you.

And to the other point, if the 20ms kill is bad but the 14ms kill is good, there’s space to argue that the cheater is worse than the players so you don’t really need anti-cheat so solve that, Skill based matchmaking takes care of that for you, he would eventually be placed with people who are better than him even with hacks.

Sure, server side anti-cheat can’t capture everything, but neither can client side, but server side anti-cheat can make it so that your client side cheats are pointless, because they can’t make you better than everyone, you have to remain averageish, and if you’re consistently above average skill based matchmaking will bump you up and up until you’re going to lose even with cheats or you will be playing against other people with the same cheats as you.

Let’s do some math here, they said:

More cheaters using Linux than legit users (…) .01% of all players base

Let’s do a quick math. The maximum peak users for Rust was 259,646 concurrent users according to https://steamcharts.com/app/252490 . Let’s assume 60% (more than half) of all the .01% users were cheaters, congratulations, you got rid of all those 16 cheaters… I haven’t played much Rust, but I’m fairly confident that there’s a bit more than 16 cheaters there.

And that’s without getting into the whole client side anti-cheat doesn’t work.

Your head is in the right place, but your example is very wrong. First, unless it’s a very slow projectile that’s not how bullets work in games, second movement takes place in the server, to do so in the client is nuts. Client sends inputs, sever moves, gives back player location, client adapts. While waiting for a reply the client simulates the movement expected, but sometimes the server doesn’t receive the package and so tells you you haven’t actually moved and you teleport back.

What’s usually not done is calculate vision cone, instead the server gives you everyone’s position and you calculate whether you can see them on your GPU. Which is why if you can get access to the GPU pipeline you can tweak it so it shows you objects through walls. If you move the LoS calculation to the server you completely eliminate wallhacks, however that is very expensive to do (although ray tracing GPUs might provide a good approach in the future)

Still, my point was about the price guess that the other guy made. Valve was very clear that it would be priced as a PC and not a console, consoles are around the 500 mark, so it would be at least 700 otherwise they would have mentioned aggressive pricing or something.

I think that was the right approach for the first controller. It is one of the worst controllers for traditional controller games, but it’s the best by a long shot for mouse driven games. So when you plug it somewhere that doesn’t have the correct drivers it’s more likely that you want to use it as a mouse than as a controller. There’s an open source driver for Linux (or at least there used to be), but I don’t think it ever got ported to Android since I guess it would require a rooted phone.

I think you’re way off, they said that they will price the GabeBox like a PC and not a console, that probably means the price for it will be around 1k since that’s what a similar PC would cost, here’s an example of the price of a prebuilt PC with a 7600 which is the GPU that they mentioned as being the closest to the one they use https://periphio.com/gaming-pcs/firestorm-7600-prebuilt-amd-gaming-pc/

Also the Frame was mentioned as being priced less but close to the Index, and the Index was also 1k with the base stations, so I think the Frame will likely be very close to that as well.

The controller I would guess around $70, but there’s likely to be one together with the Machine, so all in all I think we’re looking closer to 2k. But I would be very happy to be wrong.

That was my thought too, as far as I understand ARM is superior to x86 in many aspects, but because of compatibility it never took over the desktop market, this could be the beginning of an amazing transformation.

I mean, the VR is an ARM chip that can run APKs, so if someone can find a way to plug a SIM card there that’s it.

Yup, that’s me too, love VR, but refused to get a headset before because I would need a Windows machine. I bought a Quest 1, still use it sometimes, but I knew it was never going to be a long term for me, Meta is not a company I trust enough, and they did exactly what I expected them to do.

They do, I’m 99% sure I heard it mentioned by someone (I think it was Linus from LTT)

That’s an interesting approach, but eventually you’ll run out of shares to allow employees to buy, and you’ll have to dilute the ones you’ve already sold. You need to think that AAA studios have hundreds of people working there, and certain games have thousands of people working on related stuff that’s not directly the game but contributes, like engine, servers, social, etc.

Unfortunately for larger games individual devs don’t have that much control nor can have a mensurable impact. For example, I wrote a few lines of code for a large game, those lines will be executed every single time the game runs, but if they weren’t there no user would notice. I was told to write those lines, and it’s not something I personally wanted to add to the game, there was an issue, I was sent to fix it, I did. This is true for the vast majority of the game code, most devs are pointed to issues to fix or features to implement, they have some wiggle room in the how to do stuff, but the what to do has been approved by the boss of the manager of your manager’s manager, and unless there’s a good reason it won’t change.

Think about it this way, have you ever watched the credits from a AAA game? The vast majority (as in there are likely only a couple of persons who didn’t) of the people in that list contributed something to the game, either directly or indirectly, it’s hard to measure how much each contributed, a small but critical fix might be more important than a large but unused feature, how do you measure between the two?. Not to mention past employees who did stuff for a previous game that got re-used.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice idea, one that I would personally benefit from, but I think it’s just not feasible for large games. In short it’s impossible to be fair doing that, and people would get hurt because John from accounting got the same share that he did. And if you do it in any other way that’s not everyone gets the same share, you’re essentially playing favorites with the people whose job is to do the stuff you’ve ranked higher, even though the other person’s job is just as important.

Not sure how the prices are in your location, but these are the rough prices here in Europe that I had in mind when replying to you, I assumed the relative prices would be similar in your location, apparently I was wrong:

• 8BitDo Ultimate 2: €60 https://amzn.eu/d/56fZr1E
• PS5 controller: €75 https://amzn.eu/d/0yjVEDP
• Xbox controller: € 65 https://amzn.eu/d/7w1Q3Ib
• 8BitDo Ultimate 2C: €35 https://amzn.eu/d/43BPDAh
• 8BitDo Ultimate Wired: €31 https://amzn.eu/d/4PLthC1

Fair enough, the ultimate 2 is the same price as the Xbox and Playstation, so I guess those are also outside your range. The ultimate 2C wireless is only $5 more than the wired, I think that’s a good benefit for that price difference, but even the wired should be good since 8BitDo does good hardware.

I have lots of different controllers, and have had even more through the years. My personal recommendation is the 8BitDo Ultimate 2, should be plug and play either on wired, wireless or Bluetooth on most modern distros, comes with a stand for charging so you never have the issue of picking the controller and being out of batteries, has Hall-Effect track pads so you won’t get drift with time, has 2 extra back buttons which are configurable on steam. Plus specifically against each other major controller:

Pros over Xbox controllers:

• No need to install any driver
• Batteries included

Pros over Playstation controllers:

• Most games show ABXY glyphs