Ubisoft, why are you doing this to us? No seriously, why? It’s not like we love publishing such articles about your games. Seriously, some of Ubisoft’s games have a lot of potential. However, the French company – or rather, Massive Entertainment in this particular case – did not go the extra mile in order to take care of the PC version.
Tom Clancy’s The Division is an MMORPG. It’s the new Destiny if you like. Therefore, one would expect its netcode to be a top priority for Massive Entertainment, especially after what happened during its beta phase. Unfortunately, its netcode remains a complete mess and according to Glenn Fiedler – who has spent nearly five years as lead network programmer at Sony Computer Entertainment – Massive Entertainment will have to rewrite the entire netcode in order to protect PC gamers from hackers.
As Glenn wrote on his blog:
“Here we have a client-side cheat program that is poking memory locations and giving players infinite health, infinite ammo, and teleporting players around the level.
This indicates that The Division is most likely using a trusted client network model.
I sincerely hope this is not the case, because if it is true, my opinion of can this be fixed is basically no. Not on PC. Not without a complete rewrite.”
This does not really surprise us. The beta build of Tom Clancy’s The Division suffered from the very same issue, something that Massive Entertainment promised to fix. It appears that it hasn’t and the reason. Why you ask? But because the netcode may need to be completely rewritten in order to fix such an issue.
Glenn concluded:
“If a competitive FPS was networked the other way, with client trusted positions, client side evaluation of bullet hits and “I shot you” events sent from client to server, it’s really difficult for me to see how this could ever be made completely secure on PC.
I’m rooting for the dev team on this one and I sincerely hope really they can turn it around.
I hope they’re not using a trusted client networking model. I hope they have something up their sleeves. I hope they have a valid networking approach based around server-side checks that can address this issue in some way…
But unfortunately, so far, all signs point to no”
Thanks Eurogamer
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Rather unfortunate. Because Massive didn’t implement serve-side checks to deter hacks, and more so because some people can’t be trusted to play the game fairly. Technology is a great thing; human greed not so much.
Server side checks wouldn’t solve the core issue. What you’d really want, as stated in his blog, is the actual simulation running off the server, including players weapons, movements, actions, etc.
“Top-tier competitive FPS games don’t work by having clients send a bunch of actions to the server for validation such as: I moved over here , I reloaded my weapon, I fired my gun, I hit this guy and did X damage. The server does not sit there and run checks over the stream of actions sent to them by each client, validating each action, checking to make sure each action is safe, magically detecting cheaters and banning them from the game.”
…
“What happens instead is that the server takes the inputs from the client and runs those player inputs in THE REAL GAME (on the server). What happens as a result of those inputs on the server is what really happens and is seen and experienced by other players in the game. Not because those actions were sent from the client to the server and magically validated, but because those actions are what actually happened on the server in response to the player’s inputs.”
While running the game off the server sounds like an ideal solution, I wonder what effect it would have on the bandwidth requirements. They would go up significantly I believe? While other multiplayer-oriented games like CSGO could probably pull it off, I wonder how it would fare for a technologically “heavier” game like The Division.
bandwidth requirements would fall on the server providers shoulders. It would raise, however it would depend on the engine, for instance UE4 doesn’t see much of an overhead using this method. The other things to take into consideration is that it’ll be more intensive for the servers CPU as well since its actually performing the simulations.
SQUAD is a game that employs this as well, and they found their animation system actually tanks everyones performance cause it impedes the server sides CPU by quite a bit. It is fixed by optimizing the hell out of anything simulated by the server. Squad devs didn’t realize this (they formerly worked on a mod for BF2 called Project Reality and didn’t have to do this much before) and are now actually creating new animations from scratch.
But wouldn’t having so many server-side calculations require the client to be synched more frequently as well; as in the case of streaming?
For the most part yes, however we’re at a point where if properly optimized it can be well within the servers abilities to handle it. We are on hte verge of seeing the ability for single cores performance to be improved upon much till we get either a new revolutionary material (Eg Graphene) or a whole new physical architecture and software that we’ll see the core wars appear. Broadwell-E will have a max of 10 physical cores, Zen being reported to have 16 at some point, I haven’t seen much on Kaby lake but it should be the evolution of skylake with 6/8/10+ core offerings.
AMD already reported preparing a 32core server side CPU and intel already reported 72 cores. It’ll trickle down to the consumer segment over the next couple of years once software is more parallelized.
Yes, but that’s all server-side, correct? How would that speed up things client-side since data needs to be synched either way? I thought that was the whole drawback of “streaming”.
Was the drawback, but now its getting easier to handle. Optimizations in both game and engine (resources handling including bandwidth usage), better hardware (physical CPU, ram, etc), ISP’s offering better services are all assisting in enabling these newer technologies that were once intensive technologies be realized in todays games. Its not an inherently bad process, unless you do things wrong. For instance even Animations can be extremely taxing if done incorrectly, and that also requires to be synced between server and played if you want a consistent experience (arena games, FPS’s, etc). So having unoptimized animations can even bring the server and players to a crawl.
An example would be Other World Industries early access game Squad. It limits the players FPS bad because they put in a placeholder animation system, and they didn’t realize how unoptimized it was. The game is still in Alpha, however its a good example of how these things work together.
Sounds good. I suppose such advancements in tech as well as aforementioned game optimizations need to be deployed and tested across a wide spectrum of games before a multipurpose solution to the bandwidth problem may be chosen.
Ubisoft cannot do multiplayer. We have been saying it for years and yet this sort of thing happens every single time.
they’re using a trusted client networking model, this was pointed out in the early beta of the game. they cant code a crap…. ubisoft always f* something. always.
big price drop incoming
I bought this game last week its a great if you have some friends to play with if solo do not buy this if ubisoft cant fix this then all dlc should be free on pc
LOL
“It appears that it hasn’t and the reason. Why you ask?”
English please?
Good thing I wasn’t excited for this as far as the game play goes, graphics looked nice (mostly before downgrade) other than that it’s just the same MMOFPS with extremely boring design and now this netcode issue, thanks God I didn’t wasted my money and bought Dark Souls 3 instead.
Same here I knew this game would launch with Massive issues(Pun intended) But seriously, it’s Ubisoft they always screw us PC gamers in some way. People called me a hater when I predicted this game would not last, so many major issues are popping up the game will be dead in 6 months. I got BF4 vibes with this netcode and other glitches constantly popping up in the game.
pc gaming is a joke today:
no triple a exclusive
multiplayer full of hacker and cheater
only indie and stupid game
the optimization not exits (batman arkham knight LOOOOL)
and more game like gta v release after 1 years
I think that the next generation do not get it
Speaking of optimisation, how are those sub 30fps console games doing? Lichdom Battlemage play well at sub 20FPS, hows the screen tearing and loading times? How are those remasters, paying for online play and waiting for Rise of Tomb Raider on PS4 going?
LOL
Enjoy your cinematic 25fps while playing Batman. PC gamers are enjoying the game at 60fps in high res.
ok i’m going to play red dead redemption…OPS you can’t LOL!
You say one game while we PC gamers can play thousands of games right back from before 2000. ok then, good argument their dude. Maybe use the last of us none argument while you are at it, we’ll just list the ton of great PC games console gamers can’t play.
http://gearnuke.com/atlus-usa-shuts-persona-5-pc-xbox-one-says-wont-happen/
another game not coming to PC,in this gen the playstation 4 have all game!
And yet there are many more that ARE coming to PC that never came to PC before, want a list? Guess all those exclusives XB1 games coming to PC and have done, you missed those as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_exclusives_%28eighth_generation%29#PlayStation_4
and the game from xbox one are bad optimized like quantum break or gears of war!
Couldn’t care less what consoles have that PC doesn’t, or vice versa to be perfectly honest, but no one has to pay publishers and/or devs to make games exclusive to PC, it’s often the extra expense of updating a console game that makes many if not most, smaller devs go PC only.
I was a console only gamer in PS2 days, when the XBox/PlayStation exclusives wars flared up for 360/PS3 , I decided I would choose my platform, and only games released on that chosen platform. would even exist for me.
For reasons of control and screen size, mobile games are also out of bounds.
Rhyme off whatever names you want, they simply don’t exist, if not released for my chosen platform, which is the PC or I wouldn’t be on this site.
I have no desire too even look at what “Red Dead Redemption”, even is. I don’t care or even want to know. It’s not a game I can play, so why would I even care about it.
If it ever appears on my choice of platform, I will assess it’s PC credentials. From the little I’ve read, only first party games get console exclusives now. You can have them, I don’t want to know
I have more games than I can even play in my back catalogue, bought for a fraction of what I paid on consoles.
I’m not concerned about what I can’t play, just what I can, and that’s only counting the ones I already own.
New games I rarely buy on release, but those rarities, give me many hundreds of hours enjoyment. My mods do that though, not vanilla, but that gives me great Value for Money, for the full price.
If the only reason you buy a console, is because of exclusives, you have no reason at all, because if you didn’t buy them, exclusives wouldn’t even exist.
You are being conned, into buying hardware, you don’t even need.
I walked away from that con, and have no regrets.
you know most pc gamers also own at least one console in my case i always had one of the playstation consoles because their exclusives were the less likely to hit pc unlike the xbox “exclusives,and i dont love nintendo as much,but about the red dead redemption argument playing it on ps3 i just couldnt ignore the fact the performance was not stable and the image quality felt like they smeared vaseline all over the screen to hide aliasing this game needed a pc version to trully shine at least on xbox it was a bit clearer but still could see the aliasing and still i preffered 60 fps anytime…anyway thats besides the point i grew on consoles true but always wanted a pc as a kid couldnt afford it,already as a kid i figured out pc was more versatile than consoles for gaming first of all the games always looked better on decent pc but also the fact we could mod and tweak and the simulators and the strategy games and fps games plays better with M/K combo and if you want to use a controller you can!
you want to play on the couch? you also can!
you want to play old games YOU CAN!
want to play old console games nowhere to be found at even better graphics and sometimes even better performance? YOU CAN via emulators i play wii game with a real wiimote via the dolphin emulator and in full HD unlike the 480p native console resolution!(try mario galaxy 2 and skyward sword in full hd those game were meant to shine on higher resolutions)
in conclusion yes pc gaming can get sometimes tedious but unlike my super noisy ps4 fan i can fix it and today with google you can figure out anything so no more excuses
if i had to choose one system to play for the rest of my life
IT WOULD BE PC ANYTIME!
I wonder why he keep visiting this site if he only plays on consoles.
*facepalm*
Suck it.
Potato gaming is a joke today:
1) No modding (as usual). Ever struggling attempt to bring mods to consoles which is failing so far. Just Cause 3 LOL.
2) 20 – 25 FPS cinematic experience in almost every ambitious game.
3) 720p – 900p resolution despite being called next gen potatoes. Sometimes lollipop of 1080p dynamic resolution (ROFL).
4) Games are hyped and advertised by using high end PCs then downgraded to run on potatoes.
5) No option of keyboard/mouse. Stuck with controllers. We have both.
6) No games like Street Fighter V and Killer Instinct due to corporate shet from Microsoft and Sony while PC get both.
7) Extremely small life cycle, there are already rumors of new PS and XB.
8) No discounts like Steam, memberships required to play multiplayer and access other bare bone features.
Enjoy the true next gen gaming, we are happy with our PCs.
i think this game needs a rewrite in graphics to be able to compete with Crysis 2(2011) visuals
Your getting really boring with your stupid comments about this game.
The game is stunning you obviously don’t have a good enough rig to appreciate it at its highest settings.
i am playing that game on highest settings without the Nvidia PCSS!
and it looks terrible!
So you keep saying and saying it over and over won’t make it look better from your point of view either, so shut up, get over it.
even in 1440p it looks bad!
Then get your eyes tested or a better monitor.
There is actually a bug in this game that when you change the video settings, the brightness resets to 50% so makes the game look washed out. I set the brightness to 0.5 and it looks much better.
i have acer predator so i think is good
C.ockstar.
It’s okay they will rewrite it on The Division 2 so they can have a selling point.
Division 2 paid DLC**
The divisions an MMO? I guess starcraft is as well…
It’s got MMO elements you see in other MMO type games yeah.
Like limited players, not so massive. MMO has been used in MOBAs and even Hack n Slash RPGs limited to 4 players. MMO doesn’t mean what it used to.
MMO elements is what I said, it’s more a blend of genres.
TL;DR: I Disagree.
The only elements to an MMO is Massively Multiplayer Online. For the sake of this argument whether FPS or RPG or FPSRPG hybrids is irrelevant. You cannot just have a multiplayer or online game and state “Elements of MMO”. What makes an MMO an MMO is having hundreds or thousands of players in the same land. However now we’re seeing MMO incorporate limitations to how many players in an area.