DMG numbers

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Echothesis wrote:

Client needs data to show health bars fill.

Client simulation is sufficient for this purpose.

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Echothesis wrote:

And calculating all of those in client (instead of sending final values from server) would be a very poor move, exposing their internal formulas to reversers.

Formulae which… they explain themselves?

Formulae which the likes of Path of Building rely upon?

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Echothesis wrote:

I am not pretending to know PoE backend personally, was just extrapolating from common sense.

Respectfully, that’s quite a polite way of saying “making assumptions; presenting them as facts”.

I have literally;

• Worked for a game development studio.
• Been on the team working on an ARPG.
• Sat in on multiple meetings on this very topic.

The takeaway was that we could never do this and hope to be profitable.

The suggestion that GGG pays six digits a year to do something which facilitates them showing damage numbers and then doesn’t show damage numbers is just completely untenable. That is not how for-profit companies behave. This would’ve bankrupted my previous workplace.

I’ve no idea what you think GGG’s servers’ tick-rate is, but I’d suspect that’s also wildly unreasonable. The formerly-indie single, PvE-focused game studio isn’t going to be paying for top-tier FPS tick-rates.

I play on a 144hz monitor with ~100-180 FPS at any given time. GGG’s tick-rate might be… I don’t know… 4? So assuming I’ve 144 FPS and the client is getting combat updates from the server 4 times per second, what does it do with the health bars the other 140 times per second? It obviously can’t wait to draw the frame and just cap my FPS at 4…

The only answer to that is that it freezes the health bars between updates, but then the client would always feel like it’s lagging and you’d be paying an inordinate sum of money to make your client feel like a laggy disaster. Every latency spike or dropped (relevant) packet would exacerbate this terribly.

I’d also point to the massive number of (often ToU-violating) third-party tools for PoE that the community has developed, and ask why nobody had made a tool that displays the damage numbers you claim are being sent to our computers. If the information is there… why not allow people to see them? Community developers can’t do this, because the numbers aren’t there.

There was an information around here that server ticks are 0.033s for combat calculations. People have been testing it trying to minmax things like CoC with attack speed and cooldown reduction. Which implies that client replication rate cannot be too far behind, and definitely not 0.25s like you said.

About six digits a year and "inordinate sums of money", well I am glad that you work in circles where dev time is priced that high :), but adding damage numbers would have that kind of cost only if it was never ever considered and supported during initial development. Which is not obvious, which is why I've made assumption that it is doable now. If PoE client indeed simulates most of the session, damage numbers can be drawn from that simulation, no way it would be totally impossible logically.

About 3rd party tools, ripping static data from client to use in your own app is one thing, but modding the client and directly interfering into performance-heavy screen output is another league, especially considering how often it is patched.

And if you meant making separate screen overlay to try and show numbers, that would take basically building a real-time POB machine and finding out accurate monster positions on screen at breakneck speed. Which is still too much for free helper 3rd party tools.

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Echothesis wrote:

There was an information around here that server ticks are 0.033s for combat calculations.

Going to again ask for a source.

(Are you suggesting the server updates the client that often?)

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Echothesis wrote:

People have been testing it trying to minmax things like CoC with attack speed and cooldown reduction. Which implies that client replication rate cannot be too far behind, and definitely not 0.25s like you said.

Oh, I don’t doubt that they have been.

I’m not convinced that such testing is going to be massively revealing when it comes to tick rate, however. The server can make certain assumptions - to offer a rudimentary example, if the server knows you’re holding down Cyclone and you’ve 8 APS and the server parses combat calculations 4 times per second, it can account for 2 attacks per update.

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Echothesis wrote:

About six digits a year and "inordinate sums of money", well I am glad that you work in circles where dev time is priced that high :), but adding damage numbers would have that kind of cost only if it was never ever considered and supported during initial development. Which is not obvious, which is why I've made assumption that it is doable now.

I didn’t bother factoring in staff actually doing the work.

It wouldn’t mean hiring any additional people, so I didn’t think it necessary.

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Echothesis wrote:

And if you meant making separate screen overlay to try and show numbers, that would take basically building a real-time POB machine and finding out accurate monster positions on screen at breakneck speed. Which is still too much for free helper 3rd party tools.

Who cares about the positioning of the numbers? The numbers themselves are what matter.

You’re asking us all to believe that the server sends them to the client (which… doesn’t use them?) so it should be trivial to snoop on the network traffic and display the numbers sent in an overlay.


Edit: Wait, I don’t follow. What would necessitate “building a real-time POB machine” ? Literally the entire point is that the community developer wouldn’t be calculating the numbers because - according to you - the server is sending them to our computer. The dev would merely go fishing for them and put them in an overlay. No part of the work would resemble Path of Building.


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I might gently point out that it would take less time than you’ve spent typing responses to me to conclusively prove yourself correct by opening the client, watching the damage numbers come in (no need to worry about formatting them), take a screenshot, and embed said screenshot in a post.

Instead of ‘hey I uploaded a Wireshark screenshot to Imgur, it was nice talking to you’ you’ve spent the last 10 minutes speaking in hypotheticals and what “common sense” allegedly dictates. (All while also suggesting GGG drop 5 digits / month on making hyper-accurate health bars which don’t lag.)

Whenever 1) someone claims to know what they’re talking about, 2) they make a claim that is inherently trivial to prove correct, and, 3) they spend a bunch of time in a discussion but never quite seem to get around to furnishing such proof… I can’t help but become just a wee bit suspicious.

You could ask me to disprove it - but if I did, you could suggest that I was afk in town and that’s why there were no damage numbers. Typically discussions avoid asking that one prove a negative.

Wireshark is a free download. Taking and uploading screenshots is also free. Where are the numbers?

0.033s if from poe wiki, mentioned for example at this page: https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Cooldown
before that it came from reddit, but I didn't bother to look for the very first mention.

About how exactly poe data replicates, I answered you in first response, that I don't know it for fact. If you wanted to "teach me a lesson" for using too concrete initial phrase of "damage numbers already arrive to the client" without adorning it with maybes and couldas, whatever, you are correct.

But your whole perspective was a bit biased. I did not intend to write that as technical paper with far-reaching conclusions and business strategy, not being paid six digits for that. If you think people should only post on gaming forums when they have wireshark dump or disassembled client to prove every word, there are somehow a lot of posts here where people are just throwing ideas and having fun. So I hope you had fun assuming the worst about me and teaching me in finer points of linguistics.

I would guess there would be an uproar if people found out how much damage certain monsters actually do to you. When Sirus-infused mobs first came out, they were lightning fast and speculated to do around a million raw damage in a single hit. While I can't confirm that, I CAN confirm that I never made a character tanky enough to go toe to toe with one.

My brother was playing the unnerfed Akane miner build at the time (this was tanky enough to afk tank pretty much anything else in the game) and he went down in pretty short order too.

The other instance of something extreme I can remember is when Ritual league launched where there was a small chance that the final ritual would hit you with an obscene amount of damage, high enough that I never heard of anyone surviving it.

I think Mark_GGG has mentioned the server tick and the relation of very short ignite or sort


need to dig out the url but it is there in reddit