You could definitely hide far players, but as soon as a player is near enough they could be seen, particularly when dealing with humans making unpredictable input, that player’s model will need to be placed in the world before either of them are supposed to see each other because the game has no way of knowing what that unpredictable input might be.
You can’t have every permutation of a given player model being obscured by every possible combination of angles of scenery as distinct models in the GPU memory, so something client side will need to do that slicing, so a player’s obscured origin location will need to be known by the client. This could give a player seconds of time to react depending on their opponent’s strategy
A few milliseconds is the only advantage a player needs at the top level of these games to shift the balance in a given contest. And given the prizes for some of these tournaments is multiple millions, there’s definitely the motivation to go to these seemingly extreme lengths
But the server is the authority on player location. It can tell if a player is visible to another because it knows their locations (as well as any obfuscations) at any given instant. It doesn’t need to know what they’re going to do next until it gets that next input from the client.
Obviously calculating this requires more work on the server’s part, but in smaller competitive matches this is totally doable. We’re talking basic wireframe vectors.
Right, but as I mentioned unless you have an actual infinite number of variations of every player model (impossible, you can’t store infinite variations in fixed storage), you’re going to need the full player model in GPU memory and something client side will need to do the chopping with knowledge of the players origin coordinates, it’s impossible to determine the shape of and position the chopped shape without sending that information to the client. Streaming graphics data from a server into even a top of the line GPU would be a prohibitive hit to game performance when milliseconds matter.
It’s not processing power that’s the problem, it’s the speed of light
This is definitely solvable, though. The server can only send the client location updates of players they should be able to see.
If someone tried to wall hack, they’d only see the last known location before line of sight was broken.
Giving the client that data at all is like playing Battleship side-by-side and telling the player not to look at the other board.
This is what I mean by mitigations
You could definitely hide far players, but as soon as a player is near enough they could be seen, particularly when dealing with humans making unpredictable input, that player’s model will need to be placed in the world before either of them are supposed to see each other because the game has no way of knowing what that unpredictable input might be.
You can’t have every permutation of a given player model being obscured by every possible combination of angles of scenery as distinct models in the GPU memory, so something client side will need to do that slicing, so a player’s obscured origin location will need to be known by the client. This could give a player seconds of time to react depending on their opponent’s strategy
A few milliseconds is the only advantage a player needs at the top level of these games to shift the balance in a given contest. And given the prizes for some of these tournaments is multiple millions, there’s definitely the motivation to go to these seemingly extreme lengths
But the server is the authority on player location. It can tell if a player is visible to another because it knows their locations (as well as any obfuscations) at any given instant. It doesn’t need to know what they’re going to do next until it gets that next input from the client.
Obviously calculating this requires more work on the server’s part, but in smaller competitive matches this is totally doable. We’re talking basic wireframe vectors.
Right, but as I mentioned unless you have an actual infinite number of variations of every player model (impossible, you can’t store infinite variations in fixed storage), you’re going to need the full player model in GPU memory and something client side will need to do the chopping with knowledge of the players origin coordinates, it’s impossible to determine the shape of and position the chopped shape without sending that information to the client. Streaming graphics data from a server into even a top of the line GPU would be a prohibitive hit to game performance when milliseconds matter.
It’s not processing power that’s the problem, it’s the speed of light