This has been the biggest annoyance in the game for me since launch and only gets worse every time there is a big player spike. Why is this game server authoritative? Now I don’t actually know exactly how darktide servers work but it sure does feel server authoritative and I see absolutely no reason for this.
Ever get hit mid dodge? Ever get teleported back? Ever have your inputs just not happen? All of that is due to the game being server authoritative and there is absolutely no benefit to this. So what are we afraid that people are going to hack and have invincibility cheats or something? Who cares its a co-op game, its not like it will hurt the other player’s experience that much compared to the horrible server authoritative issues.
Just make it full client authoritative. If I don’t get hit on my screen I don’t get hit, if I shoot on my screen I shoot. Will this make hacking extremely easy? Yes. Will this make the combat feel about 10,000x better? YES. Sure the servers are often fine but why do I need to deal with stutters and teleporting and all of that at all? Server issues should only ever appear in minor desyncs that don’t actually matter at all where a enemy suddenly dies or a team mate teleports a bit or something, these wouldn’t seriously effect gameplay compared to the way bigger issues with the server authoritative system.
people would 100% make and use all kinds of very blatant cheat mods which would force fatshark to implement some sort of anticheat system, and it seems to me like they don’t want to do that
the alternative is just letting it happen, see vt1 where when you play with randoms you need to install a cheat prevention mod or people will just give the entire team infinite lives. and in vt1 even the cheat prevention mod has cheats built in lol. it’s messy and i don’t want them to go back to that, modders and mod users can’t control themselves for the good of the gameplay
that said netcode can improve outside of this with basic logic things. the fact that a skitarii with aimbot active is subject to standard hitreg and can miss is stupid, and there’s no excuse, they just didn’t bother making it work. same goes for poxburster push logic etc
Darktide has a way bigger player base, at worst every like 10 games you might have someone who runs around invincible and I would way rather that then being teleported back into a crusher overhead or getting hit mid dodge every other game. If cheating does get out of hand then we can always go back.
The current netcode is worse. Id rather deal with a one off cheater every now and then, then deal with teleporting enemies and my attacks getting canceled and all that nonsense. I straight up cant play the game on one network, its not even a bad one I can play other multiplayer games fine but darktide is completely unplayable with even just a not great network connection.
And besides does it matter if your team mate is some omega sweat with 20,000 hours in the game or if they just have invincibility cheats? Does it actually effect your gameplay? Its the same end result and I frankly don’t care about my team 90% of the time. Id rather have smooth and consistent gameplay at all times.
I’m willing to not have mods if it means that Darktide becomes an actually good functioning game. I’m even willing to have cheaters if hypothetically they wouldn’t add anticheat back. It’s whatever for me, I just really want this game’s dogshït netcode to be better.
I (and many others) have given both bug reports and feedback on the issue since launch but Fatshark does not give a shït.
implications reach far here. their way to prevent mods in this case easy anticheat, which during the pre-purchase access when it was briefly on was taking 20-30fps flat off the top for most people. for me personally that would be a bad tradeoff.
i really think you underestimate how dogshitt giving cheaters free reign is also. i actually really tried to keep playing vt1 even after vt2 came out, but it just wasn’t ever gonna happen and be fun anymore again
theoretically, there’s many solutions to this like what DRG does (modded lobbies) or how vt2 handled it or many other concepts. nothing actually truly stands in the way of doing something like that. i don’t think big reworks are going to happen though. this in itself makes the idea of overhauling the netcode to be client authorative unlikely too.
if they did put so much effort in they should do it right and come up with a proper system where people can play without cheaters and where people are in control of their own client if they want.
this also bleeds a bit into drm concerns so it’s probably a can of worms they don’t want to open
i maintain that if fatshark was to actually start doing something about the netcode issues (probably wont) then they should just optimize and improve and straighten out bad logic like with the poxbursters
The issue isnt with the quality of netcode its with the type of netcode. You cant polish a turd and in the context of precise melee combat games, server authoritative netcode is the biggest turd in existence.
you can totally and 100% improve e.g. poxburster netcode logic. the whole push angle, push distance thing but only-if-it-targets-you thing is just trash. it’s not a fundamental issue, it’s just a terrible implementation. it’s SUCH a low hanging fruit to make this not totally stupid
like maybe if the actual stupid garbage like this is fixed, things would be a lot more bearable with the current system, which is very unlikely to change
No I don’t believe I’m underestimating it, I do actually feel that strongly about this issue.
How strongly? Well you can see the sheer wasted effort I put into compiling a post powered through spite here: Server authoritative gameplay problems
I appreciate you bringing up DRG mods cuz I forgot that existed, it’s (to my understanding) a genuinely great system they have. I’d love to have that.
Its nice that you dont seem to struggle with network issues at all. I dont have such luxuries. I can play plenty of other games perfectly fine, including other semi similar melee games but this game really does feel awful to play if you even just have a less then perfect connection. Turn on a VPN to somewhere semi far away and then try to play the game, and try not to throw your PC out the window by the end of your first game.
where did i say or imply this? i’m literally just saying there is plenty of room for improvement without fundamentally changing clientside/serverside balance significantly
also real talk. if they’re not even gonna fix things like the poxburster lag compensation logic then on what basis are we assuming they are currently employing anyone competent enough to rewrite the netcode to that degree?
some things are adjusted relative to ping (snipers and dogs will take longer to attack/pin you the more ping you have)
some things are absolutely NOT clientside at all nor compensated, the 2 big ones being shooters shooting you and trappers (you need to pre-dodge these)
Melee enemies feel somewhat adjusted but I don’t know how much it is, like dodging feels fine at high ping, but blocking feels horrendous
There is a lot of things that are server side that should NOT be server side. Like switching weapons and attacking. I have spammed click only to have my attacks stutter and not come out and I have had my weapon switched back multiple times. It really does not feel like anything is client authoritative, if the server doesn’t think your doing something it makes you not do it.
those things are server authorative in every pvp game and they don’t have these kind of rubberbanding issues, the issue seems to be that fatshark sucks at writing netcode
Idk I don’t write netcode but I have never had a different game forcibly switch my weapon. The server should never be able to say “No you didnt switch weapons”.
the server should absolutely be able to say that, and it does in basically every pvp game for reasons that should be obvious, but it shouldn’t be apparent to the player because the weapon swap event is actually so simple and predictable that there’d have to be severe incompetence involved to make it rubberband and bounce back the way it does in darktide
darktide may also be skimping on servers to achieve these kind of things that no other dev manages or is too ashamed to leave in their games.
there’s plenty of other examples of this, tangentially related. i don’t see this mentioned often but on release shooters were literally afk. standing still doing nothing, on damnation 90% of the time because the servers couldn’t handle the ai processing.
Only your camera movement is fully clientside, everything else is dictated by the server.
Darktide is literally the only PvE game I’ve ever played that does this, and it’s also the only PvE game I’ve ever played where the server rolls back everything I do if it lags. Probably cuz it’s almost completely unnecessary and is terrible for game-feel.
client-authoritative vs server-authoritative hit detection in DT: id love a definitive explanation of this from anyone (which facets of DT use which). on/off for years, I’ve experienced exactly what Harridas’s video clearly shows.
yeah, the last thing I wanna see is another IAmLupo mod ruining the game for people. I’m unaware if v2 players were up to the same kind of shenanigans (or if it was possible. I played solo 90% of the time).
at risk of resurrecting the horse so it can be killed and beaten again:
^ in my mind, that is the solution.; you host a game, you become the authoritative server (that’s my understanding of how solo / self-hosting worked in v2).