[HN Gopher] Show HN: Hacker League - Open-Source Rocket League o...
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       Show HN: Hacker League - Open-Source Rocket League on Linux
        
       Author : molli
       Score  : 167 points
       Date   : 2024-09-05 13:24 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | indigodaddy wrote:
       | Not that similar except for the retro graphical style, but I
       | immediately thought of bzflag after I clicked the video
        
         | squarefoot wrote:
         | Same here, maps like bzmatchball or passtheflag came to mind.
         | Whoever makes a more modern, still free, simple and equally
         | fun, version of bzflag will probably win a good number of
         | players among people from under 20 to over 50. Not that bz
         | isn't fun as it is today, but I miss the much bigger community
         | it had many years ago.
        
         | molli wrote:
         | But I don't use textures :P
        
         | tomtom1337 wrote:
         | Oh my god! Thank you for reminding me of bzflag! Those are
         | great memories!
        
       | klaussilveira wrote:
       | Curious: why Eigen for math? Isn't it oriented towards academic
       | purposes? Wouldn't something like Terathon be faster?
       | 
       | https://github.com/EricLengyel/Terathon-Math-Library
        
         | shortrounddev2 wrote:
         | I see glm more commonly
        
         | molli wrote:
         | Because I use it only for the physics. For Vulkan I used glm.
         | Ideally, we should only use one library.
        
       | LorenDB wrote:
       | SuperTuxKart also has a soccer mode available.
        
         | marcodiego wrote:
         | And it is very funny. I used to play it sometimes and then I
         | told a friend about it, he then introduced me to rocket league
         | which I didn't knew at the time.
        
       | Toorkit wrote:
       | Sick, when is HLCS?
        
         | molli wrote:
         | :D
        
       | nazgulsenpai wrote:
       | Looks just like Rocket League! Seriously though, this is awesome
       | and the single source file makes it much easier to poke around
       | the source without cloning. Thanks for sharing!
        
         | molli wrote:
         | You're welcome. The binary is only ~100kb and no game engine
         | etc. is used.
        
       | polyvisual wrote:
       | I've been playing different styles and genres of video games ever
       | since Wolfenstein 3D and I consider myself pretty adept at
       | playing them.
       | 
       | However, Rocket League is one game that I just can't master. I've
       | tried, really really tried, but I just can't play it with any
       | amount of skill.
       | 
       | It's a shame, as it looks really fun and I hear my son and his
       | mates having a ball when they play.
        
         | richrichardsson wrote:
         | I basically suck at Rocket League (can't get beyond Plat.III in
         | any mode), but I still enjoy playing it daily.
         | 
         | Turn off _ALL_ chat except tactical team quick chats, otherwise
         | it 's a toxic quagmire.
        
           | amenhotep wrote:
           | What a save! What a save! What a save! What a save!
        
             | bigstrat2003 wrote:
             | Calculated.
        
               | vonunov wrote:
               | Centering! Take the shot! Take the shot! Take the shot!
               | Wow! Wow! Nice shot! Thanks!                 vote to
               | forfeit 1/2
        
             | harryvederci wrote:
             | Thanks! Thanks! Thanks! Thanks! Thanks!
             | 
             | This is rocket league!
        
           | mh- wrote:
           | It's very weird seeing RL discussed on HN - worlds are
           | colliding! But, yes, this is good advice. Also consider
           | playing 1v1. I'm Diamond I-II there. It's a lot of fun, and
           | probably the only mode where turning off the chat doesn't put
           | you at a disadvantage.
        
           | splwjs wrote:
           | I think online matchmaking has absolutely destroyed people's
           | ability to feel like they're good at any game.
           | 
           | Like you'll never be a big fish in a small pond. If you
           | played as much as you currently do but could only play with
           | people local to you, you'd be the best person you know at
           | this thing. And that's a really good feeling. But you'll
           | never get that feeling, because you should really be grinding
           | past whatever plat 3 is in order to not suck.
        
             | ThatPlayer wrote:
             | Conversely you'll never be a small fish in a big pond. If
             | you could only play with people local to you and they all
             | played much more than you, you'd be the worse person you
             | know at this thing. And that's a really bad feeling. That
             | gets people to quit games.
             | 
             | The big fish eat all the small fish until the big fish are
             | the only ones left.
        
           | aliasxneo wrote:
           | I'm decent at Rocket League and sit between Plat III and
           | Diamond I. It seems our metrics are slightly different :)
           | I've found these ranks are the natural breaking point between
           | what I could classify as "sweaty" players and "casuals." I've
           | never been interested in going much further.
        
           | bil7 wrote:
           | plat 3 is really not that bad - how many hours have you
           | played the game for?
        
           | Retr0id wrote:
           | > can't get beyond Plat.III
           | 
           | I have a triple-digit-hour play time and I could barely get
           | out of Bronze. I can't really explain why, but my brain just
           | doesn't mesh with it, skill-wise. It's still a lot of fun
           | though (otherwise I wouldn't have spent so long playing it!).
           | In fact, being so bad at it somehow made it more enjoyable -
           | it's not often I allow myself to be bad at something.
           | 
           | I'd rank myself as "unusually good" at Mario Kart, which is
           | obviously a very different game, but it surprises me that I
           | have such a wide skill gap between the two games.
        
         | walr000s wrote:
         | I heard Comm, a pro, once say that he wished he had his 14 year
         | old fingers back...think he was 17 at a time. To me, a 40 year
         | old playing with KBM, I feel like I just can't bend my brain
         | around all of the 3d possibilities. I just don't have any
         | intuition for rolling my car while it accelerates towards the
         | front...and then you add in the complexity of the camera and,
         | yeah, I suck.
        
           | mh- wrote:
           | I've only just started trying to do aerials, really, and I
           | find myself getting vertigo from it haha. I'm also 40. It's
           | so disorienting. None of the camera settings feel "right".
        
             | vonunov wrote:
             | It takes some playing around with and is highly subjective.
             | Best method I found was to just try camera configs used by
             | pros or recommended by others and see what feels good. My
             | current:                 Shake: off       FOV: 110
             | Distance: 280       Height: 110       Angle: -3.00
             | Stiffness: 0.75
             | 
             | The rest aren't relevant for me because swivel speed is
             | about looking with the right stick and transition speed is
             | about switching to/from ball cam, and I leave ball cam on.
             | 
             | Of these, I believe the most important (by which I mean
             | tangibly relevant to control quality/feel) are distance,
             | stiffness, and, to some degree, height+angle. Shake and FOV
             | are also important, but those are the only good values for
             | those settings.
             | 
             | I used to play with max distance because it felt better for
             | visibility, but I found some people saying 270/280 works
             | much better for them for precise ball control and accurate
             | strikes, and that does seem to be the case. Stiffness is
             | the other setting that will make the most difference in
             | feel: Lower values let the camera's distance from your car
             | rubber-band further in relation to your speed. It might
             | seem as if maxing this out would be ideal, because why
             | wouldn't you want the camera to follow your movement as
             | closely as possible, and why would you want the camera to
             | lag behind you when you go faster and disorient you when
             | you're trying to aerial? But I'm not so sure. I've tried
             | stiffness at 1 (max) and I don't remember why, but
             | apparently it didn't work for me, because I lowered it to
             | 0.75, which I guess I found acceptable enough not to have
             | changed it. I've just come across some people saying a
             | stiffness of around 0.35 is counterintuitively great as it
             | turns out that moving the car without instantly moving the
             | camera helps a lot with car control for some reason, so I'm
             | about to test run that value myself and see about it.
        
             | walr000s wrote:
             | I highly recommend turning ball cam off once you get close
             | to the ball.
        
           | vonunov wrote:
           | Part of the problem is rolling vs. yawing. Most players have
           | something along the lines of LB mapped to powerslide + air
           | roll. So when flying, they have to think (actively or
           | otherwise) about when to roll vs. when to release LB so that
           | the left stick X axis will yaw instead. This is, in my
           | experience, very difficult to actually do.
           | 
           | There's a control config I tried and greatly enjoyed that
           | addresses this. I want to get back into it but I haven't yet
           | felt like dealing with the adjustment period again. This
           | works best if you have a controller with mappable paddles.
           | Left stick X: Ground steer and air steer (yaw)         Left
           | stick Y: Pitch       Right stick X: Air roll       Right
           | stick Y: Ground throttle
           | 
           | And then jump/boost/powerslide go on triggers/bumpers/paddles
           | as desired.
           | 
           | Being able to simultaneously yaw and roll feels quite nice
           | once you get used to it and allows for some surprisingly
           | intuitive recoveries, wall jumps, etc. "Tornado spinning" is
           | now as simple as pushing the sticks in opposite directions.
           | Other interesting results can be had from the various other
           | combinations of stick directions.
           | 
           | This does require you to no longer use the button pad for
           | anything, so if you use ballcam toggle while playing, or need
           | to peek at the scoreboard a lot, or need a thumb free for
           | real-time quickchats, or whatever, then I hope you have a lot
           | of extra paddles
        
             | walr000s wrote:
             | Another reason to envy controller players. I just can't get
             | used to it.
        
         | molli wrote:
         | Maybe you will be good at Hacker League:)
        
       | ProteanLabsJohn wrote:
       | Do a flip reset :)
        
         | deberon wrote:
         | I just ran a test and I was able to do just as many flip resets
         | in Hacker League as I was in Rocket League.
        
       | JasonSage wrote:
       | I seriously, seriously think that in the future (possibly far
       | future) various eSports will all be derived from a few open-
       | source base games.
       | 
       | The ability of game developers to leverage licensing, contracts
       | with orgs, etc. to lock down a competitive ecosystem with
       | exclusivity results in inability for a "free market" to develop
       | around running events and broadcasts. Rocket League and League of
       | Legends come to mind here, where the competitive scene is almost
       | exclusively eSports content produced by the developer itself and
       | doing all sorts of tricks to establish lock-in.
       | 
       | If we look at how traditional sports work, it's much more
       | organic. Leagues have the ability to negotiate their own game
       | rules, TV rights, oversight, and more. Leagues compete with each
       | other for viewership, because viewers naturally want to watch the
       | best games (or their local games) and viewership drives revenue
       | via sponsorships and TV licensing. Game developer lock-in
       | prevents this economy from developing, prevents the competitive
       | nature of leagues from working on improving the game from a
       | viewership perspective, and the closed-source nature of the game
       | prevents the game from being able to "move on" from bad rules,
       | bad communities, bad design, etc.
       | 
       | Many (most? all?) of these online competitive games have toxic
       | online communities and in-game interactions. The game developers
       | don't have the money to develop exhaustive anti-abuse mechanisms,
       | or to pay a large support staff to sift through reports, so lots
       | of times the best you get is a simple heuristic. And these
       | companies are not financially incentivized to ban bad actors. In
       | fact, they're incentivized to ban _as few as possible_ without
       | damaging the player base. Players will quit over toxic
       | interactions and cheaters, but cheaters and toxic players can
       | also be the most reliable spenders in a game, so there's to
       | reason to ban any more of them than absolutely necessary.
       | 
       | But with an open-source game, communities can self-organize and
       | self-moderate. If I play on a local soccer team and they're all
       | racist or homophobic, I'll find a new team or a new league. But
       | at present there's no "find a new Rocket League".
       | 
       | So I think open-source games will have a big impact on the
       | competitive online game industry. I think the resulting ecosystem
       | has a lot more sustainability and player stickiness than current
       | games do in light of the aforementioned toxicity and anti-
       | competitive patterns, so there is much more money to be made than
       | game developers are making currently.
        
         | shard972 wrote:
         | when esports mostly exists as a loss leader to sell video games
         | I don't quite see this vision anytime soon.
        
           | mh- wrote:
           | I get your point, but I'm not sure _loss leader_ is quite the
           | way to describe it. I think of it as a marketing /promo
           | expense like any other. Are user conferences loss leaders?
           | 
           | Also, RL is free-to-play nowadays. They're banking on in-app
           | purchases, not sales of video games.
        
         | tylerflick wrote:
         | > The game developers don't have the money to develop
         | exhaustive anti-abuse mechanisms, or to pay a large support
         | staff to sift through reports, so lots of times the best you
         | get is a simple heuristic. And these companies are not
         | financially incentivized to ban bad actors. In fact, they're
         | incentivized to ban _as few as possible_ without damaging the
         | player base.
         | 
         | I can promise you this is not true. Major publishers absolutely
         | try to curb toxic behavior and are heavily invested in doing
         | so.
        
           | JasonSage wrote:
           | I'm interested in learning more about this. Obviously this is
           | something I care about and want to be well-read in when
           | presenting a case. I do know in League of Legends that
           | there's a lot more care and attention put into it, and
           | frankly I suspect that it's because they have the money to do
           | so and because they care deeply about the game still being
           | relevant in 1 & 2 decades from now. The same can be said of
           | Fortnite, possibly because of their closer integration with
           | app stores as well and the sensitivity of having a younger
           | audience.
           | 
           | Anecdotally, I think it can't be said of Rocket League at
           | all. It seems strongly to be profit-driven and moderation-
           | light, and I think most games that size and smaller are
           | operating the same way.
           | 
           | I'd love to hear where/why I'm wrong and what public
           | information there is on the subject.
        
             | SkiFire13 wrote:
             | Rocket League has been declining since Epic Games bought
             | them.
        
         | fwip wrote:
         | I don't think "open-source" means much of anything here. You
         | can freely copy game design and make your own knockoffs. That's
         | why half of the video gaming market is Doom-derived.
         | 
         | Anybody can make a football league, and anyone can make a MOBA.
         | But to make the next League of Legends or the NFL, you need a
         | ton of marketing money, and you need to pay to attract the top
         | player talent. The actual money you pay the developers is not
         | the lion's share of the spend. By the reports I can find,
         | Overwatch cost about $50M to make, but they spent over $900M on
         | advertising/marketing/tournaments/etc.
        
           | JasonSage wrote:
           | Open source means everything here.
           | 
           | Let's say that you want to be a tournament organizer and do
           | tournament streams of an esport. You are going to use
           | sponsorships and ad revenue to drive your profit, and you
           | have a sponsor providing the prize pool.
           | 
           | You won't be able to feature current league teams that are
           | contractually obligated to participate in developer-endorsed
           | events only, because the developer has all the leverage in
           | being able to provide a larger prize pool for their official
           | championship league (that is marketing budget for their game,
           | funded by the game itself), so esports organizations are
           | going to be locked-in to that contract.
           | 
           | The barrier to entry for you as an organizer is now to either
           | pay a licensing fee to the developer for the privilege of
           | being endorsed and allowing their contracted organizations to
           | participate, which has a huge impact on your profitability...
           | or to make your own fucking video game.
           | 
           | The open source aspect gives you:
           | 
           | - an existing player base
           | 
           | - ability to provide your own game rules
           | 
           | - ability to use exclusive visuals/assets
           | 
           | - ability to avoid licensing fees destroying your
           | profitability
           | 
           | And if your organization goes under, the game lives on. If
           | another organization goes under, you have opportunities to
           | capture more of your market. You have the ability to improve
           | your viewership by funding improvement of the game.
           | 
           | And, by the way, if you suck, somebody who can do it better
           | will come along and take your money, which is actually good
           | for the viewer and the player, which is much better than the
           | way current games/leagues deteriorate.
        
         | busterarm wrote:
         | Hard disagree. With the exception of 1v1 fighting games,
         | centralized/official servers are _required_ for esports to even
         | work. Peer-to-peer communication models and self-hosted client-
         | server games both are filled with cheaters. How would players
         | ever feel comfortable competing on community/self-hosted
         | server?
         | 
         | "Esports" games require absolutely massive communities (e.g.,
         | marketing) and no open-source game has even come close to the
         | scale required to sustain an esport.
        
           | JasonSage wrote:
           | I think you're conflating unrelated things
           | 
           | Servers can be community-run and centralized per
           | league/community. See TF2 (more decentralized) and FaceIt
           | (Counter-Strike) for examples of self-moderating communities
           | than can exist outside of the developer-centralized model.
           | 
           | At no point do I assume P2P to be a requirement or even
           | beneficial in this scenario.
        
             | busterarm wrote:
             | TF2 is overrun with bots right now to the point that the
             | game is unplayable and the surviving community has been
             | screaming at Valve about this for years.
             | 
             | As for FaceIt, that came about from the existing CS
             | community. After 15+ years of the game being out. You can't
             | just build something like that in a vacuum.
             | 
             | The whole point is that "esports" depends on centralized
             | servers and somebody footing the bill for that. Even in
             | fighting games that are P2P, there's still the matchmaking
             | lobbies.
             | 
             | And you could say "well, there's FightCade!"...but a)
             | that's illegal and b) I've never seen more than 150 people
             | in a FightCade lobby and it's usually around 10-30. Esports
             | games have > 10^4 concurrent players.
        
               | JasonSage wrote:
               | I'm optimistic that as the opportunities come along,
               | players will take them.
               | 
               | Your argument sounds to me analogous to "everybody will
               | just use Twitter/X because why would somebody want to pay
               | to host a Mastodon instance with no participants."
               | 
               | The reality is that some (but not all) people do
               | genuinely have grief with the centralized platform
               | (moderation, censorship, toxicity), do have the ability
               | to pay for something better (or freeload off people who
               | do care), and are thus willing to make a change with
               | there's sufficiently low resistance.
               | 
               | The reason this is possible at all is because people that
               | did care in a very small minority made the decentralized
               | platform for free while everybody else was oblivious. It
               | doesn't get built overnight and usage doesn't convert
               | overnight, but when the solution exists it can then be
               | viable.
               | 
               | I do think open source games are a fair ways off, but I
               | find it impossible to believe that people will work for
               | decades for free on open source social media because they
               | enjoy it, but the same will never be true of games.
               | 
               | It's an eventuality, and it is one that changes dynamics
               | for the end-consumer.
        
               | JasonSage wrote:
               | > TF2 is overrun with bots right now to the point that
               | the game is unplayable and the surviving community has
               | been screaming at Valve about this for years.
               | 
               | Perfect example. With the existence of a sufficiently-
               | close open-source base, the community would have self-
               | organized TF2 out of existence with a functional
               | replacement. This just isn't possible today, but when it
               | is possible there will be no turning back.
        
           | molli wrote:
           | When a game is not popular anymore some developers just turn
           | off their servers destroying the multiplayer. That won't
           | happen with decentralized open source servers.
        
           | lupusreal wrote:
           | > _" Esports" games require absolutely massive communities
           | (e.g., marketing) and no open-source game has even come close
           | to the scale required to sustain an esport._
           | 
           | If by "sustain an esport" you mean as a profitable
           | enterprise, then probably not. Is that the best metric
           | though? Open source games can become popular enough for
           | competitive scenes to emerge; Warsow is an example of this.
           | 
           | Popular enough for competitive play but not enough to get
           | corporate sponsors seems fine to me. It's probably not
           | healthy to be promoting the idea (to kids particularly) that
           | playing video games can be a profitable career.
        
             | busterarm wrote:
             | No I mean "sustain an esport" the same as I would mean
             | "sustain a sport".
             | 
             | For it to be an actual contest it needs an actual sample
             | size of players. Sports need spectators and narratives that
             | generate interest.
             | 
             | Nobody gives a damn about Warsow the same way nobody gave a
             | damn about Ferret-Legging.
             | 
             | It's not a sport if its players are limited to "you and
             | your mates from round the way", that's just a game. Sports
             | are meant to expose the limits of human potential.
        
               | lupusreal wrote:
               | Warsow's popularity fell off but it was there for a
               | while. You can't reasonably expect every game to stay
               | popular forever, not be the most popular around. It's not
               | like every ball sport other than football/soccer is a
               | failure just because "nobody cares about it" relative to
               | that.
        
           | eikenberry wrote:
           | Cheating is a community problem, not a technical issue.
           | Esports would have organizations managing things requiring
           | players to sign up and be vetted. The community/organization
           | would handle cheating.
        
         | bogwog wrote:
         | Alternatively, the "sport" in esports is the genre (FPS, Moba,
         | Fighting, etc), and the "leagues" are the individual games.
         | Yes, the specific rules and mechanics of each game are vastly
         | different even within the same genre, and strategies will be
         | different, but skills like leadership, reaction time, hand-eye-
         | coordination, etc will be used similarly across all games. Even
         | with an open source game, it's likely each league will want to
         | make changes to the base game anyways.
         | 
         | Maybe an open source game could work for smaller "leagues" that
         | don't have the resources to develop an entire game from scratch
         | (and assuming there's even a demand for a small league like
         | that), but even then forking/building atop an open source game
         | is still a lot more work than just using an existing commercial
         | game that has more flexible multiplayer options (and so long as
         | there aren't licensing issues)
        
         | molli wrote:
         | Some very interesting thoughts here. Imo open source software
         | is mostly higher quality than proprietary one.
         | 
         | And apparently the industry is not so interested in Linux.
         | Proton from Valve is interesting but crashes on my machine all
         | the time. So I guess we have to build ourselves and have some
         | fun in the process.
        
         | ThatPlayer wrote:
         | > The game developers don't have the money to develop
         | exhaustive anti-abuse mechanisms, or to pay a large support
         | staff to sift through reports, so lots of times the best you
         | get is a simple heuristic.
         | 
         | And neither do open-source projects. The majority of people
         | looking to play video games do not want to be the ones
         | moderating. They'll take the path of least resistance and let
         | companies do it for them.
         | 
         | > If I play on a local soccer team and they're all racist or
         | homophobic, I'll find a new team or a new league. But at
         | present there's no "find a new Rocket League".
         | 
         | You don't need to find a new game though, you can find a new
         | league. Except for maybe battle royale games, most games still
         | allow private matches. Make a private match and invite the
         | people you want to play with. Organize a league yourself. It'll
         | be easier than building your own game, and you'll run into the
         | same problems with an open-source game: how do you convince
         | people to play your league rather than the official easy
         | matchmaking? Rather than the official huge playerbase game?
        
           | JasonSage wrote:
           | For certain there will be de facto community centers in open
           | source games, but the fact that a group _can_ self-organize,
           | self-fund, and self-moderate means that communities _will_.
           | 
           | Mastodon is I think a good example of this in social media.
           | 
           | A game example is Team Fortress 2, where community-run
           | servers coexist with matchmaking servers. Some of these are
           | buy-in communities, some of them are freemium ad-ridden
           | servers, some are just small friend groups. And they can pose
           | an alternative to official matchmaking on merit and exist
           | just fine. Oh, and they can remove cheaters and bots
           | themselves.
           | 
           | This is a good example to your last point: when the de-facto
           | league has cheaters, bots, or lack of moderation, people will
           | flock to alternatives en masse, but the alternative has to
           | exist for it to work. This isn't a "problem" with the open-
           | source game, it's the main feature. It's the bridged gap
           | between "building your own game" and "the official huge
           | playerbase game" -- they're almost the same out-of-the-box,
           | so neither the building nor convincing is insurmountable,
           | they're surface-level.
        
       | BimJeam wrote:
       | Very very cool. Let's make a real game out of it. No steam no
       | gigabyte large assets. Just that cool game. Maybe use some ai to
       | generate some assets with stability ai / stable diffusion an
       | let's get a lot of people on board. That could be a fantastic
       | project.
        
         | molli wrote:
         | Yup, let's do it! The binary is ~100kb :D Join the Discord
         | server that I posted here!
        
       | a1o wrote:
       | I am amazed at how small the code is once you strip all the
       | vulkan
        
         | molli wrote:
         | Yup, it's tiny (~100kb)
        
       | _fat_santa wrote:
       | Though I don't play much anymore, I absolutely adore Rocket
       | League. To me it's one of the few truly novel games out there.
        
       | molli wrote:
       | I've created a Discord server for Hacker League:
       | https://discord.gg/BbNH27st. Everyone is welcome!
       | 
       | I'll also keep building in public on X:
       | https://x.com/moritzthuening.
       | 
       | I love you all.
        
       | karaterobot wrote:
       | I played so much Rocket League before it went free-to-play.
       | Seeing this repo made me watch some youtube videos, and remember
       | what a great game it is. It's been tweaked and polished until it
       | feels perfect. I think getting an open source version of the game
       | to that level would require a lot of work, so I wish you well.
        
         | molli wrote:
         | Thanks! I'll keep it way simpler than RL - especially the
         | graphics as you can see. But we can make the physics and
         | multiplayer great, since we build everything from scratch.
        
         | JohnMakin wrote:
         | It's a great game - unfortunately the insane and obnoxious way
         | they do ranked ladder means the experience is often miserable
         | if you want to play competitively.
        
           | samtheprogram wrote:
           | > way they do ranked ladder
           | 
           | Could you elaborate? I play the game, but I don't play much
           | of anything else with ranks so I'm curious what ladder means
           | here and the alternative examples.
        
             | JohnMakin wrote:
             | I could write an essay on this (played since 2015) so I'm
             | sorry if this is overly wordy and I hope it makes sense.
             | 
             | A long time ago they had a pretty basic MMR/matchmaking
             | system that was being gamed pretty badly by smurfs. So, in
             | an attempt to deal with smurfs, Epic made a really opaque
             | blackbox "internal" MMR, that determines what kind of
             | teammates you get. The reason this exists is because
             | everyone tends to get lumped into "chokepoint" ranks -
             | Diamond 3/low champ, C3/GC, and from there I think there's
             | another one closer to SSL but I've only been a GC1 before
             | so I can't comment on that experience. The reason for this
             | is you can have a 60+% winrate in diamond and never leave
             | diamond. That results in tons of players being in a rank
             | they clearly do not belong in - very ironically creating an
             | unintentional smurf problem they were trying to addresss in
             | the first place - and this is exacerbated by a draconian
             | rank decay/reset every season which only lasts a quarter.
             | So, it's not entirely uncommon to see players with a GC
             | tournament tag from the previous season (means they won a
             | GC tournament, which means they almost certainly are SSL
             | players) in low champ or even diamond. This is made even
             | WORSE by the way that placement games work every season -
             | pros have worked out it's almost always better to just sit
             | out the first few weeks of a season before doing your
             | placements, because you may accidentally get a really high
             | "internal" mmr (the only purpose of these placements) by
             | beating other smurfs in a low rank ladder.
             | 
             | As a result, epic has tried to balance this idiotic mess by
             | pairing these types of players with lower "true" ranks. So,
             | often when I am in high diamond/low champ I will have a
             | literal carried platinum player with me every single time
             | against another team with a guy who also has a higher
             | "true" MMR and whatever "low" MMR player the matchmaking
             | has decided he also gets paired with. I solo queue though,
             | so this effect is basically a miserable experience trying
             | to climb, as it's _much_ more difficult for me to climb out
             | of a low rank than other players closer to their  "true"
             | rank. And I have to repeat this process _every 12 fucking
             | weeks._
             | 
             | when I play casual, within 10 games the matchmaking
             | immediately puts me in high champ lobbies. So, they know
             | how to match make fairly, clearly - there's simply no
             | mechanism in ranked to quickly rank someone up who very
             | obviously should not be in the rank. It should not be
             | possible to win 15 games in a row and stay in the same rank
             | - every other game addresses this by quickly ranking up
             | people on win streaks. For whatever reason, epic does not,
             | and for this reason and all of what I listed above, the
             | experience is absolutely miserable.
        
               | batch12 wrote:
               | If it helps anyone else- The term 'smurf' is used in
               | gaming to describe a player in an online game that
               | creates a new account to play against lower-ranked
               | players, however, it can be used as an all-around term
               | for describing a player who uses an alternate account or
               | multiple accounts.
               | 
               | Matchmaking Rating (MMR)
        
               | JohnMakin wrote:
               | yea, sorry, these are common terms in that community I
               | didn't explain, thank you. When I'm using it here it
               | mostly means "someone who is intentionally playing in a
               | rank they don't belong in"
        
               | stackghost wrote:
               | Pretty sure that "Smurf" originated with the Tribes
               | series, as you could create alias nicknames/accounts that
               | showed up as blue in the player list.
               | 
               | Or at least, that's the first time I encountered the
               | term.
        
               | Cpoll wrote:
               | The etymology I've heard is that it comes from Warcraft
               | 2, where some top players made Smurf-themed alt-accounts
               | after everyone started dodging them. That may be
               | apocryphal.
        
               | thoughtpalette wrote:
               | I remember a guy on Tribes literally named Smurf IIRC.
               | +]-[+ SmuRF or something.
        
               | bonestamp2 wrote:
               | Very well said, it's so frustrating.
               | 
               | One thing that has always bugged me, and that I've never
               | seen discussed, is that when I play solo they'll pair me
               | up with two other solo players and then match us up
               | against a 3 player clan!
               | 
               | Even if we all have the same rank, they're not at all
               | considering the advantage of 3 players who play well as a
               | team, and in the clan case... probably practice and play
               | together a lot. Especially at the lower ranks, but
               | sometimes in the mid-high ranks, a well organized team
               | can demolish a random group of slightly higher ranked
               | players who haven't established a playbook.
               | 
               | At times when the servers are saturated with players, I
               | think they should only match parties with other parties
               | of the same size. For example, parties of two would only
               | be matched against other parties of two and then each
               | party would get solo player(s) to reach the team size of
               | a given match. Parties of three would only play against
               | other parties of three, etc. I understand there are times
               | of low liquidity and such matchmaking would be
               | impossible, and that's fine... I'd rather play than not,
               | but when liquidity is high then I'd rather wait an extra
               | 15-30 seconds for teams and parties to be more balanced.
               | 
               | What do you think about party size aware match making?
        
               | JohnMakin wrote:
               | > What do you think about party size aware match making?
               | 
               | I'm heavily in favor of what you said, and yea, back in
               | the day when psyonix owned it there was a mode called
               | "solo standard" which was 3v3 but you couldn't join with
               | a team. It was awesome, people who did well in that mode
               | tended to be extremely good teammates - you kinda had to
               | to succeed. As a result it was usually much less toxic.
               | Epic killed that mode almost immediately and it made me
               | super upset.
        
               | JohnMakin wrote:
               | > when I play casual, within 10 games the matchmaking
               | immediately puts me in high champ lobbies. So, they know
               | how to match make fairly, clearly - there's simply no
               | mechanism in ranked to quickly rank someone up who very
               | obviously should not be in the rank. It should not be
               | possible to win 15 games in a row and stay in the same
               | rank - every other game addresses this by quickly ranking
               | up people on win streaks. For whatever reason, epic does
               | not, and for this reason and all of what I listed above,
               | the experience is absolutely miserable.
               | 
               | Adding to this note, the blizzard card game Hearthstone
               | has had the same notorious problem for as long as I've
               | known (havent played in a few years no idea if it
               | changed, I doubt it). They started to mess around with
               | bonus mechanisms for win streaks, but largely before
               | legend ranks (which worked with a much more sane ranking
               | system) you would never be put in a higher rank if you
               | went 50-0 vs going 200-150 - the game viewed that as
               | exactly the same. The result was the same as with rocket
               | league - huge rank choke points in which people were
               | stuck for weeks playing players far above their own rank.
               | Frustrating for both sides, and the only reasoning I can
               | put behind it is they want you to spend more time
               | grinding, and that's the only way they can think to do
               | it.
        
       | extraduder_ire wrote:
       | I like the name carball for this genre of game. Good choice.
        
         | molli wrote:
         | Thanks!
        
         | bonestamp2 wrote:
         | Soccar
        
       | Cieric wrote:
       | I find projects like this really fun, but when it comes to being
       | a game I am seeing a lot of problems.
       | 
       | - renderer and physics aren't synced in any way, physics
       | shouldn't be tied to frame rate, but running as 2 separate
       | threads with no synchronization means you might read garbage at
       | some points if you render while the physics thread is updating.
       | 
       | - physics using this_thread::sleep_for is not accurate and can
       | sleep for longer than the specified time, assuming the period to
       | be 1/60 isn't correct. The delta time needs to be measured.
       | 
       | - using VK_PRESENT_MODE_FIFO_KHR or VK_PRESENT_MODE_MAILBOX_KHR
       | force vsync, but vsync can be anything. With the physics system
       | being locked to 60, you'll notice a stutter on non-mulitiple
       | vsyncs like 144hz. There aren't many solutions I know for this,
       | but the main ones I know of are interpolation and extrapolation
       | of the physics state based on the framerate. I would bump the
       | physics update rate to 120hz to match rocket league and then
       | experiment from there.
       | 
       | - Using both Eigen and GLM is overkill in this case, both are
       | slow, but if sticking with one I would use switch solely glm.
       | 
       | - More of a nitpick, but I would separate out all the code at
       | least between rendering and physics to their own independent
       | files. The vulkan api on it's own adds a lot of clutter, moving
       | that to it's own file should make the project easier to navigate
       | and explorer.
       | 
       | There are more things, like how hard coded that shaders are, but
       | I assume the vulkan renderer will be improved past just being
       | from the vulkan-tutorial, so advice for that can't really be
       | given till the renderer has been updated.
       | 
       | P.S. Sorry if any of this sounds harsh, it's not my intention.
       | I've just done a lot of work involving games, game engines and
       | renderers. And I'm seeing a lot of the problems I made when I
       | first started. I wish you the best of luck with your project.
        
         | molli wrote:
         | Thanks a lot for the feedback! I built it in ~2 weeks and it's
         | really just a prototype at this stage. Some of the points I did
         | on purpose to finish a prototype quickly (Eigen + GLM, one
         | file, not syncing renderer and physics, hardcoding shaders
         | etc.). But some things I didn't know - thanks for that :)
        
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