Pirate Software's "rearchitecture" for Stop Killing Games
There's been a lot of fascinating drama around Stop Killing Games. Go read the initiative here:
It is a good initiative, and anyone who is a consumer that can, should absolutely go support it.
Jason "Thor" Hall, CEO of Pirate Software, recently had a few, let's say, "takes" on the matter (I'm trying and failing to remain neutral), which began on a stream. The stream's VOD has since deleted on his YouTube channel.
Louis Rossmann, who you might know as the largest Right to Repair activist in the US, made a response to a section of the releevant stream here:
Thor, CEO of Pirate Software, made two videos to clarify his points:
There is an argument in the video at the 2:08 mark that I will reference later.
(I recommend watching all these videos on 2x speed. You will get the same info out of them all, because especially video 2 is a lot of repetition)
Now, as mentioned above, there is one particular technical argument that bugs me about what Thor, CEO of Pirate Software, is making. Here is the full quote:
How would you keep League of Legends in a functional, playable state? You'd have to rearchitect the entire game. The game is what is called "client-server". So, in client-server models, there's a server, there's a client, and all of the math, all of the game, everything happens on the server. The client just displays it. And the reason we want to do it that way is so that you can't teleport around and do a billion damage. You don't trust the client. You trust the server. The client just displays what it's told. Right? So, if we wanted to rearchitect this, we would have to take all of that server logic, push it back out into the client, and somehow make that playable in a multiplayer-only video game. That doesn't make sense to me. So this doesn't work for all games. Why is [the initiative] calling out all games?
So, first off, yes, most games do client-server architecture for multiplayer logic, because you do trust the servers. It is an important step to curbing an entire class of cheats. It doesn't necessarily mean the client isn't malicious (for example, there are cheats for League of Legends that show a growing circle when an enemy leaves the fog of war in the minimap). However, it does mean the client doesn't know 100% of the game at any time when information is selectively fed to each client based on something like the fog of war. That's awesome.
Some games, like PlanetSide (rest in peace) and Overwatch (2) use what's called client-side hit detection. Some games, like Halo 1, employ more selective hit detection models, where only certain weapons use client-side hit detection (see https://c20.reclaimers.net/h1/engine/netcode/). Client-side versus server-side hit detection can change the overall feel of a game, and it's one of the things game developers decide on in multiplayer-only games that require it. In the case of an massively multiplayer online first person shooter (MMOFPS) like PlanetSide (2), the server simply can't calculate thousands of people's math in a reasonable amount of time, because otherwise the hit detection would otherwise feel very crappy to play, and so the math is offloaded to the client and the client says "hit" when they hit.
However, there are a few counterexamples to the specific technical argument that keeping the game playable after end-of-lifing it requires rearchitecting:
Games with dedicated servers exist - Command & Conquer: Renegade, Starsiege: TRIBES
Games where one client also hosts the multiplayer server exist - Half Life 2, Warhammer 40k: Space Marine
Private server hosting exists - World of Warcraft
Some of these games, particularly the examples with dedicated servers that can be run on user hardware, can also run as the second example.
To say keeping a multiplayer-only online game requires rearchitecting a game like League of Legends means a lack of imagination. More relevantly, it means a lack of systems thinking.
To me, it is very strange for someone such as Thor, CEO of Pirate Software, who is self-described as being a 20 year veteran of the games industry to say. I won't say skill issue, because I think there is an ulterior motive at play.
Just to hammer the point home, I drew up some crappy diagrams in Inkscape because this extremely wrong technical argument bugged me so, so much.
Here is what a client-server model looks like:
Here, you have 10 clients, each being a player of the game. Then, you have the server, run by Riot, the developer and maintainer of League of Legends.
Here is the imagination of Thor, CEO of Pirate Software, had to say on the matter on the required way rearchitect it:
Those who know their network models would understand this looks very much like a mesh network, or a peer-to-peer model. And, to be fair, some games might attempt it.
However, this isn't *usually* how games described using a peer-to-peer (P2P) model work. Most peer-to-peer models, like the architecture used in Space Marines, are often used for matchmaking. Once you are in a game, one of the clients also serves as the host (selecting by some algorithm, like randomly or whoever has the best hardware).
P2P is nice, because the company doesn't have to run servers for matchmaking at all during their lifespan (and sometimes a matchmaking server might be spun up to serve as a relay to help with network issues or help other clients find clients quickly). As we'll get into later, a client machine will also serve as the host machine. It is a perfectly fair and valid, although it comes with it's frustrations (mainly in the realm of network address translation (NAT) traversal, because your computer behind a router is not usually exposed to the wider Internet, though sometimes routers have universal plug-and-play (UPnP) set up, which makes NAT traversal much easier here).
If you've ever seen a message in the game "migrating host" because the host left, they likely use P2P matchmaking, but still use a client-server model. They can just migrate the game data to a new host using the data on the other clients as a seed for the data.
This is likely their setup for actual gameplay:
One of the clients now has a server on the same machine. Sometimes, this could be the game itself that would serve in singleplayer. However, most often, this is just a server that's lightweight enough for the client to connect to and they play that way (it's also really nice to develop and QA this way, because many server bugs will also be seen by the client).
Now, one of the disadvantages here is: Can all remote clients connect to the host that the server (and one of the clients) is running on? Again, NAT traversal issues usually play a role here. In the first few days of any game that uses this, and only this, there will likely be a lot of issues with connectivity.
Another disadvantage: The host won't have latency issues. This is why in the case of, for example, Among Us, the client host can see certain things happening (like someone is dead the moment they hit a button or reported a body), but remote player hosts might not.
Okay, so, maybe it's not possible to rearchitect something like League of Legends like this. It could reasonably be a lot of work. Here is another solution:
Looks very similar to the first architecture, doesn't it? It is! The difference is that the text "Riot" was changed to "not Riot".
This is how World of Warcraft and Pokemon Go private servers work.
The vast majority of games that would not run without private servers simply do not require rearchitecting to keep in a reasonably playable state when the servers shut down.
