When another player takes control of your units....

Everything that happened screams scripts.

lol. What? Nothing you've posted is even the least bit suspicious. Does it happen when you're against one opponent and never when you're against someone else? That's suspicious. Nothing you've said is even the least bit suspicious. It's almost certainly a bug of some sort, either in the game code or in the server code. Until you have evidence of multiple occurances while playing against a single player, you really don't have any ground to stand on and call this a hack. It doesn't make logical sense at all. You're just grasping for straws.

There was a bug in CoH1 that made your units uncontrollable and sent them across the map. It wasn't a hack. Give up on this "hack this, hack that" nonsense until you have proper reason to be suspicious.

I had this too, I thought I was nuts!

I had it bad on Lienne forest a few weeks ago. 1 particular rifle squad would retreat constantly and when it wasn't retreating, it would walk to a point on the south side of the map in the corner....

THIS! I've had the same experience plus more but yes, a unit (or units) is either retreating or marching off to some random (unhelpful) spot on the map. In this way, the unit is kept occupied either marching or retreating and wont respond to commands.

Did you notice anything else? Was the game acting funny, generally? 'Jittery' in a way?

you got a very rare form of desync. i've seen it twice. the first was in a bot stomp on scheldt, the second was in a long as game on sittard. both times i know it happened because my assuie partner started complaining over voice chat about his units moving without him issuing orders. there were either not units at the spot he pinged or there were someone else's. his game ended up ending with us losing while the actual game ended 20-30 min later with our victory.

i asked here and got no responses.
http://www.coh2.org/topic/32949/divergent-reality-desyncs

I am now fascinated by this and how it ultimately works. Just what kind of crazy and screwy thing must happen to make it occur.

I wonder if it has something to do with how the AI takes over when a player leaves. You end up still being there but the AI has become activated.

I am now fascinated by this and how it ultimately works. Just what kind of crazy and screwy thing must happen to make it occur.

I wonder if it has something to do with how the AI takes over when a player leaves. You end up still being there but the AI has become activated.

that's my guess. since they're out of the "real" game it's probably just letting them watch the ai play an alternative game. what i'm not sure about is what happens with everyone else. do they become AIs too?

This happened to my teammate today in a 2v2. Not sure wtf was going on

This thread is sooooo creepy. Units moving around without orders, mysterious retreats, won't listen to commands. THE GHOST OF THE FÜHRER IS IN COH2!!!

lol. What? Nothing you've posted is even the least bit suspicious. Does it happen when you're against one opponent and never when you're against someone else? That's suspicious. Nothing you've said is even the least bit suspicious. It's almost certainly a bug of some sort, either in the game code or in the server code. Until you have evidence of multiple occurances while playing against a single player, you really don't have any ground to stand on and call this a hack. It doesn't make logical sense at all. You're just grasping for straws.

There was a bug in CoH1 that made your units uncontrollable and sent them across the map. It wasn't a hack. Give up on this "hack this, hack that" nonsense until you have proper reason to be suspicious.

I experienced that once in steam COH1 and COH2.
I told my units to cap stuff, build stuff, the units always move away in the middle of capping / building, Paks moving away in battle, and the games was lag like crazy, I don't really believe it is some kind of hack, but that game is really frustrating and irrational.

I had this too, I thought I was nuts!

To the folks saying its input lag, please pipe down. It's really nothing of the sort, not unless the game UI and raster coordinates can become out of sync with the actual commands.

I had it bad on Lienne forest a few weeks ago. 1 particular rifle squad would retreat constantly and when it wasn't retreating, it would walk to a point on the south side of the map in the corner, near the green cover of the forest VP. Same point every time. Not once was it ever ordered there, and despite being commanded multiple times to go elsewhere or stop it wouldn't. It would stop (or do as commanded) for about 5/10 seconds then, walk off on its mission to the point in the forest. Often whilst still selected!

Another weird bug....

+1, I've experienced it as well. My units where constantly going to certain places and nothing I could do (except retreat them) would stop them wanting to reach their mysterious destinations. I thought it was a hack at first but after reading other happenings and thinking about my own experience, it does feel more like a weird bug.

In saying that my soldiers truly did have a mind of there own...

The game has alot of issues: imput lagg, bugs and YES, INSUFICIENT CHEATS PROTECTION, no matter what Inverse or others say. As long as maphack exists and can be used, why wouldn't this be a cheat too?
COh1 was a cheater's heaven, can't say this about COH2 but still you can cheat. Why oh why after a while a new patch was installed you meet sometimes such inspired players that never do mistakes while 2-3 weeks after each patch you never meet such players?

Because maphacking is relatively easy to do since it's necessary to make all game data available to every client. It's impossible to prevent maphacking in a deterministic simulation game engine, which every single RTS uses. There's no comparison between being able to display hidden data that you already have and issuing commands on behalf of another player; one is theoretically very easy, while the other is theoretically very hard, if not essentially impossible. The fact that you even think the two are comparable is laughable.

THIS! I've had the same experience plus more but yes, a unit (or units) is either retreating or marching off to some random (unhelpful) spot on the map. In this way, the unit is kept occupied either marching or retreating and wont respond to commands.

Did you notice anything else? Was the game acting funny, generally? 'Jittery' in a way?

What really stumped me, was the game was completely normal except this random 1 rifle squad acting this way.

Everything was in sync, I was doing coordinated attacks with my team, no sync error at the end, no jittering, no lag. That's why I thought I was crazy.

I could understand if the unit kept going to a location I commanded it to go to, but the place in the forest it kept going to was a place I had never sent it throughout the entire game. So it's not as if it lagged and ignored my order then went later.

But yeah, strange and very annoying. Glad I wasn't the only one.

It's impossible to prevent maphacking in a deterministic simulation game engine, which every single RTS uses.

i don't know how hard it would be to code and it would require servers but you could not report units to player that the player can't see. it would require the server to run LoS checks though. obviously this isn't something to add to CoH2 but to implement into a new engine. this would also help prevent the AI from knowing where every unit is, which is something that has always bothered me.

Then you have a client-server game. There's a reason RTS games have traditionally never been client-server: it's impractical. The cost per player is insane, and while CoH generally has less individual units in play at any given time than other RTS games, it's still prohibitive. Not to mention the game engine would essentially have to be rewritten with a client-server architecture in mind.

not necessarily. fps games solve the problem quite nicely by allowing both private servers and individual hosting. there isn't any reason an RTS game couldn't do the same thing. I find CoH2's approach kind of odd because they went half way. i understand doing something like battle severs for ranked matches but there isn't any reason to use them for custom games.

and yes, implementing something like that with an existing game wouldn't work; it's far too much work. you would have to build the engine with the capabilities to hide units from the beginning or at least work it in with a major update (like essence 5 for DoW3 as an example).

Your suggestion is very strange. CoH2's approach isn't odd, it's actually fairly standard; Blizzard did the same thing with SC2.

As for why client-server is impractical in an RTS...

RTS games have to keep track of exponentially more entities than an FPS. Destructive and dynamic cover in a game like Battlefield actually isn't all that demanding for a server because it's structured. You can't just destroy anything, and everything you can destroy is set up to be destroyed in certain ways. All the server needs to do is keep track of the destructible entities and their current states, then refer to those states when making hitbox calculations.

In an FPS, you rarely have more than 128 players in a single server (competitive games usually only have 10-20, depending on the title). That means the server only has to keep track of the locations of 128 entities, and calculate hitboxes on those entities. It also only has to send very limited player data, such as location and player action (firing, reloading, changing weapon, etc.). Even though FPS games usually run at a significantly higher tickrate than RTS games (CoH's simulation engine runs at around 8 ticks per second, compared to between 64 and 128 ticks per second for CS:GO games), it still uses significantly less bandwidth than an RTS that has to transmit location, health, entity, and action data for potentially hundreds of different units.

This is a big problem in a game like Starcraft where players often control over 100 units late in games. If both players had 100 units to command and the game was running at 8 ticks per second, the game would have to transmit and receive 1600 (100 units * 2 players * 8 ticks/second) units of information per second. Compare that to a 1v1 in CS:GO, where at 64 ticks/second the game would only have to transmit/receive 256 units of information (note for games like Battlefield, where the tickrate is far lower than that of Counter-Strike, the difference would be even greater).

That's 6.25x the bandwidth being used in the RTS compared to the FPS in order to accomodate the same number of players. Now if we look at things from the CoH perspective and use 15 or so units per player instead of the large numbers typical of traditional RTS games, we can get the bandwidth down to something approaching that of an FPS. However, we still have to consider the cost angle.

Dota 2 is structured very similar to an RTS, which makes sense considering it was originally an RTS mod. It was designed from the start to use client-server because it was designed first and foremost as a competitive game, and a competitive game that cannot gracefully handle disconnects makes running serious competitions an administrative nightmare. However, such architecture comes at a pretty steep monetary cost. Servers have to be globally located in order to accommodate people around the world, have to be maintained, and most importantly, have to be able to handle the immense bandwidth that a client-server game with large unit counts is going to produce. That last point is the most expensive, and one of the main reasons (along with having to recode most of their engine) why Relic will never adopt such a structure for CoH2. Maybe for CoH3, but even then it's unlikely.

Valve was willing to spend that money because they were trying to build a competitive game and a competitive community and knew they needed consistency if they were going to be taken seriously. Hell, they committed $1.6 million to a tournament prize pool before the game was even released to the public. Relic has neither the money nor the inclination to invest in something like that when it's seen as a luxury and not a necessity.

So no, building an RTS with a client-server model isn't impossible, especially if you have low unit counts like CoH does. But it's expensive, and in the case of CoH2 it would require a major rewrite of most of their codebase. In other words, it's completely impractical to hope for such a system to be implemented in CoH2.

If you're interested in reading more, I'd highly recommend this Gamasutra article by a Supreme Commander developer. Very enlightening on the challenges surrounding synchronization, message passing, and bug fixing in RTS games: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/126022/Opinion_Synchronous_RTS_Engines_And_A_Tale_of_Desyncs.php

And another interesting article, this an academic piece on SC2's pseudo-client-server architecture: http://choongsoo.info/docs/starcraft2.netgames12.pdf

From http://www.coh2.org/topic/19148/drop-hack-continues/post/257032

i would actually argue that CoH2 has made a progressive move with the battle servers as most of the RTS games i'm familiar with (all older) do not have anything other than local host. what i'm suggesting is what i see as a further step to improve the playing experience. i get that this is a copypasta but i'm going to address what i see even though i've already addressed at least one issue.

In an FPS, you rarely have more than 128 players in a single server (competitive games usually only have 10-20, depending on the title). That means the server only has to keep track of the locations of 128 entities, and calculate hitboxes on those entities. It also only has to send very limited player data, such as location and player action (firing, reloading, changing weapon, etc.). Even though FPS games usually run at a significantly higher tickrate than RTS games (CoH's simulation engine runs at around 8 ticks per second, compared to between 64 and 128 ticks per second for CS:GO games), it still uses significantly less bandwidth than an RTS that has to transmit location, health, entity, and action data for potentially hundreds of different units.

not sending data for unseen units would reduce the minimum work load and bandwidth required by the server as it would only have to receive the data from each player on units and send to player units that close to being visible.

Servers have to be globally located in order to accommodate people around the world, have to be maintained, and most importantly, have to be able to handle the immense bandwidth that a client-server game with large unit counts is going to produce. That last point is the most expensive, and one of the main reasons (along with having to recode most of their engine) why Relic will never adopt such a structure for CoH2. Maybe for CoH3, but even then it's unlikely.

This is true but it would only need to be done for ranked games which would help reduce the cost. custom games do not need this level of control to prevent cheating; it's a custom game. in their case 3rd party servers rented by players would be fine and there's always local host for the times when you don't care or there are no other options available.

So no, building an RTS with a client-server model isn't impossible, especially if you have low unit counts like CoH does. But it's expensive, and in the case of CoH2 it would require a major rewrite of most of their codebase. In other words, it's completely impractical to hope for such a system to be implemented in CoH2.

again, i realize this is copypasta but i'm not proposing this be implemented into CoH2; it would require a the amount of work that is only done on major engine versions.

But why, as a game developer, would you write two completely different versions of your netcode? It's impractical. Not only would you waste a lot of money on essentially duplicating code, but you would have to absorb the increased cost of running the game in a client-server environment. You would, right off the bat, need better servers and more bandwidth because even the most basic client-server setup is going to use more CPU power and bandwidth than simple message passing.

And what do you do about custom games? Do they use battle servers? If so, now you're maintaining two separate groups of servers that do essentially the same thing. Do they use straight P2P? Then you have hacking in tournaments. Do they just use this new server config? Then you need even more of the more powerful, more expensive servers to handle your load.

Then you have to worry about line-of-sight calculations on the server. This wouldn't really reduce bandwidth all that much, since the clients would still have to send you all of the information on all of their units every tick; still much more expensive than simple command passing. Then you would have to perform calculations on that data, and finally you would have to send the relevant details to the clients. No matter which way you slice it, you're suddenly forced to dedicate substantially more server resources to every single player in a game.

The simple fact is, something like that will never happen because no company is going to produce one version of netcode for ranked play and another for unranked play, because that's insane. So the only viable client-server setup is to make everything client-server and pony up for your substantially increased server costs. If a company like Blizzard didn't think that was worth it, you can bet a company like Relic won't think so either.

But why, as a game developer, would you write two completely different versions of your netcode?

why would there be two different versions? you have a small section where you can change whether the host is one of the player's machines, a third party server, or an official one that requires authentication. FPS games like TF2 already do this. I feel like we're talking about two different things here...

And what do you do about custom games? Do they use battle servers?

they can either be local hosted or hosted on a third party server. for something like a tournament the sponsors would provide the servers (if they felt it was necessary). again with the TF2 analogy, you have leagues where one of the teams provides a server for the match and if there are issues you swap to someone else's server.

Then you have to worry about line-of-sight calculations on the server. This wouldn't really reduce bandwidth all that much, since the clients would still have to send you all of the information on all of their units every tick; still much more expensive than simple command passing. Then you would have to perform calculations on that data, and finally you would have to send the relevant details to the clients. No matter which way you slice it, you're suddenly forced to dedicate substantially more server resources to every single player in a game.

the server would have to do LoS calculations, which would increase its load, but it would only have to send data for units that would be visible or nearly so to each player. information on a howitzer idling across the map wouldn't be sent by the server because the receiving player has no need to know about it at that moment.

That makes more sense, but it's still drastically more expensive than simple command passing, and it scales terribly once you start considering anything beyond 1v1 because you have far more data to send and exponentially more calculations to make.