How Hit Registration Mechanics Work in Hunt Showdown

[cageymaru]

The Hunt Showdown developers have penned a highly technical article called "The State of Hit Registration in Hunt" that explains how hit registration works in Hunt and video games in general. They describe in great detail how network latency in the client and server relationship can create shot validation issues as the client is never on the same page as the server due to latency. Then take into account that there is a second client in the mix at the same time, and this creates a situation where opposing gamers can experience different scenarios play out in real time.

The solution to this issue is for the server to use hit validation; as the server essentially becomes a referee and it has to choose who wins the battle. The server runs a set of calculations to determine if the shot was valid by looking at the past history of the world state. The hit validation system is skewed in "favor of the shooter", but sometimes legitimate shots are invalidated as shown through video footage examples contained in the article. This is a great article to read through multiple times to grasp how hit registration in video games works!

Your ping, which you can measure via your game performance stats, is the amount of time a message takes to go from your client to the server, and then back to your client. This latency--which is caused by ISP infrastructure, distance, hardware connection quality, and other factors--is not a problem that any one game can solve. It's something that all game development teams have to account for, and we all have strategies for minimizing its impact.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

I can't watch this right now, but this is an interesting topic.

It's great to have a behind the scenes look. Hopefully people will pay attention, and spend less time complaining about hacking.

 

[HeadRusch]

 

[Lazorz_Go_PewPew]

I love the insights these developers keep giving us.

 

[1Nocturnal101]

Great article and nice read.

 

[seanreisk]

That was great. Not only good info, the transparency gives you the feeling you can trust the developers and the decisions they make.

Which doesn't matter, because everyone is gonna shoot my head off. I stink at twitch.


P.S. Hunt is one of the few games I really enjoy watching (I also enjoy watching WoT, which is somewhat similar to Hunt). That's amazing, because I think most esports are dumb. Who would watch Fortnight? The pro's get close to each other and then they start this ritualized tower building that looks like wooden pallets are being made in a popcorn popper.

P.P.S. $22.49 on Steam early access right now.

 

[ThreeDee]

I enjoy watching these insightful videos about Hunt and the programming side of things.. Showdown is my digital crack. That's all I have to say about that....

 

[TMCM]

Pft you kids don't even know about ping times. Let me tell you about playing Quake on my 28.8 US Robotics modem lolol

 

[FrgMstr]

Pft you kids don't even know about ping times. Let me tell you about playing Quake on my 28.8 US Robotics modem lolol

N00b. 9600baud was where it was at.

 

[lostin3d]

I had my packets written down on a scrolling paper and delivered via a messenger on a horse!

& then transcribed to even smaller paper to be delivered to the next hop via carrier pigeon(world's first OTA connection!)

 

[lostin3d]

Great article.

I often wondered about this stuff with the plethora of connection varieties and the problems therein not to mention any issues with the hardware a client is running on. From games like this to online racing I've always had doubts about how player positions are calculated especially when it comes down to milliseconds.

 

[Bankie]

P.S. Hunt is one of the few games I really enjoy watching (I also enjoy watching WoT, which is somewhat similar to Hunt). That's amazing, because I think most esports are dumb. Who would watch Fortnight? The pro's get close to each other and then they start this ritualized tower building that looks like wooden pallets are being made in a popcorn popper.

P.P.S. $22.49 on Steam early access right now.

It's fun. Too bad the game is practically dead at this point.

 

[FrgMstr]

It's fun. Too bad the game is practically dead at this point.

Yeah, the devs messed up bad over the holidays. Dropping a performance killing patch, then going on a few week Christmas break. They upset a lot of their community. Crytek rolled out v4.2 patch yesterday that fixed the performance issues in a huge way, but I think half the player base left. Maybe some will start coming back in now too. I played some QuickPlay last night and did not have issues getting players on West, but the queue times still sucked.

 

[umeng2002]

Devs explaining stuff instead of cryptic, "performance tweaks" mentioned in release notes.

Love it.

 

[DoubleTap]

I hate the hit detection in (most) modern games. The trusted client model actually gives higher ping players the advantage that lower ping players used to have.

Throw in some loot boxes, make every fps game about leveling up and unlocking weapons and cosmetics and then keep people from running their own servers and despite the fact that our computers are 100 times better than they used to be, gaming in general is a muddy, imprecise mess.

 

[Inacurate]

I'm glad there's more awareness and transparency on the issue, but "netcode" in general is hit or miss and changes with each game engine and/or developer implementation and their preference for client or server side validation.
I wish there was more standardization on this all around.

This game using Cryengine V has a tickrate in the 80s most of the time, but can achieve better!
That really allows for me smoother feeling gameplay and less instances of "dying through walls/cover" all around.
I didn't know Cryengine supported that much, that's awesome.
Definitely puts me in the "would purchase" column, but I have enough games to play currently.

Long time CS player and back in the day overall netcode was just awful and caused a lot of "lag compensation" issues with hit detection/registration and few players took discussions about it seriously, just wanting to ignore the problems of the bad netcode even though servers could be 64 or higher.

Much as I enjoy Fortnite, it feels like CS all over for me and irks me to no end that such a popular game was built on an engine that can't do better than 30 ticks.
Epic has made fantastic improvements in the area to mask or smooth over the issue, but at the end of the day 30 is the max and your "best case" scenario on any game using Unreal Engine.

I'm in disbelief that people can seriously have "competitive" matches on engines that don't support tickrates of 60 or better.

 

[readeh]

I'm glad there's more awareness and transparency on the issue, but "netcode" in general is hit or miss and changes with each game engine and/or developer implementation and their preference for client or server side validation.
I wish there was more standardization on this all around.

This game using Cryengine V has a tickrate in the 80s most of the time, but can achieve better!
That really allows for me smoother feeling gameplay and less instances of "dying through walls/cover" all around.
I didn't know Cryengine supported that much, that's awesome.
Definitely puts me in the "would purchase" column, but I have enough games to play currently.

Long time CS player and back in the day overall netcode was just awful and caused a lot of "lag compensation" issues with hit detection/registration and few players took discussions about it seriously, just wanting to ignore the problems of the bad netcode even though servers could be 64 or higher.

Much as I enjoy Fortnite, it feels like CS all over for me and irks me to no end that such a popular game was built on an engine that can't do better than 30 ticks.
Epic has made fantastic improvements in the area to mask or smooth over the issue, but at the end of the day 30 is the max and your "best case" scenario on any game using Unreal Engine.

I'm in disbelief that people can seriously have "competitive" matches on engines that don't support tickrates of 60 or better.

Gold src engine is one of the best when it comes to tickrate and registry. Back in the days matches were always on a 100+ tick server, and usually always 128tick.. Not sure what you are raving about. Lag compensation only went into effect at 150+ ping. Same with source version of CS.

This game is a slug fest so you mostly won't feel a huge difference upping the ticks, while something like Adrenaline Gamer a faster update rate was needed to keep it consistent when you fly through the map in 10 seconds.