Ok, I just did an entire write up and then shit canned it half way through because there’s a question I need to ask.

I naturally use Nvidia’s Linux drivers.

… which… ones?

Because PopOS has its own way of doing Nvidia drivers.

https://system76.com/support/articles/system76-driver

Installing the System76 NVIDIA Driver for Systems with NVIDIA GPUs

If your system has an NVIDIA graphics card, use this command to install the System76 Driver with NVIDIA graphics drivers included:

sudo apt install system76-driver-nvidia

In addition to the standard packages, this package also pulls in the System76-supported NVIDIA drivers and all related packages needed to take full advantage of your dedicated NVIDIA graphics card

If you are manually trying to do your own Nvidia Linux driver install, on PopOS, that could cause some nonsense problems, where you would be in a state of essentially having 2, or kinda 1 and a half… sets of drivers installed at the same time, which would/could lead to bunch of extremely esoteric configuration problems, possibly including what you’ve reported so far.

I think there may be some general confusion between ‘ray tracing’ and ‘raycasting’.

Thanks to Nvidia, ‘raytracing’ now means ‘doing an utterly absurd amount of raytraces all the time in order to have slightly more accurate relfections and light physics’.

Whereas, at least the lingo I’m familiar with, ‘raycasting’ is just like… a single ray, maybe a couple to form a frustrum, or maybe one that follows some bouncing vector math rules, to do a fast simulation of a bullet trajectory, or maybe its just attached to the player to tell the rest of them game something like… the player is on the floor, the player is standing infront of a wall or a short stairstep or climable ledge, etc.

Clients are given only what the server says to tell it…

I mean, yes, but that’s either very obvious or near tautalogical.

I’m asking what, specifically, does the server relay to the client, under what conditions, in what kind of process flow chain? The design of that chain is, largely, the netcode.

As soon as you add this type of spotting system to anything with faster movement it would create issues.

Generally this is true.

But, there are many fps games that do this, as I was saying, on the backend level. The ones where you notice it exists are the ones that are not doing it well.

Its why the vast majority of online multiplayer games are 16 total players or less, why Battlefield type games rarely ever actually get beyond 64 players on one map at a time.

It creates a bit of a funny with this because a tree will fall over, and you know a player did it, but the client is not told anything other than “put this tree in XYZ orientation now”

This kind of thing, in particular, is often due to physics being substantially or in some cases fully being handled client side, and then pushed to the server, where the server then basically either averages together what clients are saying about physics, or sometimes picks the first/fastest client physics first, etc.

This can create nonsense desync issues where two people near the same say, exploding vehicle or building, see a totally different trajectory for crashing parts, where you can get smacked by something that didn’t render for you, because the server retroactively decided it did hit you, because your client’s rendering of the physics was ultimately rejected, after a lag.

This is the main real reason why full destructibilty of environments basically does not exist in large multiplayer games… its usually a canned set of potentially destroyable objects… think of every potential physics object as almost another player, in terms of netcode load, and shit gets unmanageable fast, unless you have extremely clever game and netcode design.

There are no mods to force it to show enemy positions or change the maps. No injection cheats. No wallhacks. No invincible god-mode, flight, or becoming unspottable or flying into/out of the map. No turning a single shot into a laser of damage, or unlimited magazine. No recoil cancel. No getting kicked from session like GTA or mod-menus.

A quick websearch reveals this to be completely false, there are tons of hacks and cheat engines for WoT.

I also think this would be worth trying.

Yeah, I am inclined to agree with your assesment… my first thought was that maybe your steam install had somehow gotten misconfigured and ended up in a situation where some dependency hell was going on.

But… that doesn’t seem to be happening…

https://www.protondb.com/app/460810

People are saying it does work with Proton 10.0.3.

It could be that your specific hardware has some quirk about it which is not properly taken into account by the latest Proton…

Does Proton 9 work?

Maybe Proton-GE or some other variant?

May be the case that you’re a real guinea pig, a real test subject on this one, might have actually found a real bug in Proton 10.

In a multiplayer game, the client renders and accepts inputs.

Then, you can also just freely release the server hosting software, as was the norm in gaming, for decades.

Ever hosted a private server for anything? Batllefield 2? HL2DM? Quake 3? Minecraft? Conan Exiles? Arma 1 2 or 3? etc?

Shit, even the original Deus Ex has a mutiplayer component, that you can host a private server for.

There’s no reason that a client being subservient to the server, in a multiplayer setting, means that nececassrily you don’t control the game client.

What you are thinking of is a ‘thin client’, where the client is now not even doing rendering of the game, its just accepting player inputs, and your gameplay is actually you watching a livestream being rendered somewhere else.

Thats not the same thing as deisgning the client and server in a clever way such that the client cannot force things onto the server that it should not be able to.

There are less dumb ways to do this than the WoT spotting system.

WoT spotting system is an attempt to gamify the entire concept of spotting/situational awareness.

Does your client actually know that the enemy tank is there, but just does not let you the player see it, untill certain conditions are satisfied?

Presumably, the server knows where all players are at all times.

Does the server send other player locations out to other players… at all times? When they’re in the view frustrum and view distance range of the player? That, but also only when the spotting system stats for your player tank/crew/profile says you are allowed to see them?

To what extent is it the client or server that is making decisions realtime as to if you player X can see player Y? What do the stages of decisions look like?

Like I am genuiely asking those questions. We can’t really know for sure without the source code, so… ?

You can tweak a lot of how those kinds of systems work, and, you can make an enemy player view culling system work without an entire situstional awareness game mechanic.

You can just make it part of how networking and rendering work, and have that be the same for everyone… and if you do that well, people will not even realize you are doing it.

Yes, you’ve got it now.

The chains will continue to exist, mostly, even though a lot of ‘underperforming’ locations are gonna get axed.

Real restaurants? Either gonna have to be actually run by basically business savants, which is … extremely uncommon… or maybe have a very substantial amount of local community support… or, they’re basically gonna have to be or become luxury restaurants.

The basic idea is that if your game is designed in such a way that it must be always online to substantially function…

… when that always online support ends, you must provide a final patch and release enough of the server architecture that, if people wanted to, indpendently, they at least could set up their own version of the serverside stuff.

Either that, or, you must refund all microtransactions made in that always online world that is now by definition, impossible to access.

If microtransactions are digital goods, then shutting down the servers without any ability to emulate/run them yourself is the equivalent of half of your closet’s contents disappearing from existence when the clothing brand goes out of business.

I figured this out as an 18 yo fucking around with GMod, making gamemodes that were designed to thwart exploits and hacks.

If a professional gamedev can’t figure this out, that’s a skill issue, or a manager who won’t listen to the devs that do not have skill issues.

Every problem you have listed has a solution in proper game architecture and optimization, and latency compensation.

There are of course no 100% perfect solutions, but there are very, very good ones. You can’t stop somebody that’s gonna go to all the effort to set up a seperate box that does the aimbotting and hwid spoofs itself as not being there… oh well actually you can, overtime, with serverside analysis of games and gameplay.

Literally everything you’ve listed is a solved problem… its just that most devs don’t think these will be problems untill they’re halfway through making the game, and then its too late to make low level changes without fucking up the dev cycle set by management.

Basically, the answer to most of your questions is ‘yes’ or ‘cleverly’.

There are publically available papers on all of this.

GabeN actually used to work for Microsoft, untill he realized more people had DOOM installed on home PCs, than… Windows.

He helped basically port DOOM to Windows 95 / DirectX, realized you can run games on PCs and there was a market for it, therefore, found Valve.

No idea what the more precise timeline is, for when and where dogs started having eyebrow muscles.

Maybe if we did something comparable to the Human Genome Project, but for dogs, we could figure it out, lol?

A very large number of franchise/chain restaurants are literally just microwaving or reheating pre made ingredients or in some cases entire dishes.

https://substack.perfectunion.us/p/the-hidden-reason-why-restaurants

What restaurants do I go to?

Oh I’m fucking poor, and I act like it, so none, beyond maybe once a month, a local, non chain, american style diner or mexican place.

But what most people go to, or DoorDash/UberEats/etc., most often, in the US, is some kind of chain restaurant/fast food place.

What do you get from this terminal command?

apt show steam

And this one?

dpkg -l | grep steam

Man, actual restaurant resraurants, non chain / non franchise… are just… largely not going to be a thing in a year or two, in the US, at this rate, outside of extreme high end places.

Margins aren’t there anymore, doesn’t matter how much owners gaslight servers, or anybody gaslights consumers… if you’re microwaving premade stuff… people can do that at home.

The ‘copyright claims’ (patent violations, actually) are currently being challenged in court, that is… what the lawsuits are about.

They are also not settling out of court… they’re in court already. Meaning that the eventual settlement will be that adjuctated by the courts.

Given the total extent of damages and violations that Nintendo was originally claiming… and Nintendo’s reputation as a litigious legal juggernaut…

The common expectation, when this all started, was that Nintendo would be able to functionally sue PalWorld out of existence.

That is not what seems likely to happen.

Instead, it looks like PalWorld is going to walk away from this with some scrapes and bruises, but mostly intact, Nintendo is having to massively scale back the extent of violations and damages they claiming, because basically, their legal foundation for much of it was dubious.

Yeah, not a total victory for PalWorld, but surviving at all is an incredible victory, in context.

Part of why it is an incredible victory is that it shows that Nintendo can be successfully fought in court, and you can come out intact… as opposed to just being afraid and conceeding to their demands, assuming you would certainly lose in court.

Halo effect is real, most people aren’t self aware enough to realize that they do in fact bias their judgements of others based on how attractive they find them.

And then that gets hyper magnified through our little pocket black mirrors that most commonly destroy your attention span, thus ability to deeply consider any concept or do deep introspection, and it creates an incentive structure for people to turn themselves into superficial advertisement mascot people, which itself then becomes culturally normalized.

My, ahem, blind guess would be probably not, as they’ve… not been widely and thoroughly domesticated for 20,000+ years?

Huh! You’re right, I did not know that.

Huskies are… much closer to being actual wolves though, genetically speaking.

Seems like this applies to malamutes and samoyeds as well…?