Counter Strike Source Increase Bot Limit
Yiraika Daimaru
Multiplayer games based on the Source use a Client-Server networking architecture. Usually a server is a dedicated host that runs the game and is authoritative about world simulation, game rules, and player input processing. A client is a player's computer connected to a game server. The client and server communicate with each other by sending small data packets at a high frequency (usually 20 to 30 packets per second). A client receives the current world state from the server and generates video and audio output based on these updates. The client also samples data from input devices (keyboard, mouse, microphone, etc.) and sends these input samples back to the server for further processing. Clients only communicate with the game server and not between each other (like in a peer-to-peer application). In contrast with a single player game, a multiplayer game has to deal with a variety of new problems caused by packet-based communication.
Network bandwidth is limited, so the server can't send a new update packet to all clients for every single world change. Instead, the server takes snapshots of the current world state at a constant rate and broadcasts these snapshots to the clients. Network packets take a certain amount of time to travel between the client and the server (i.e. half the ping time). This means that the client time is always a little bit behind the server time. Furthermore, client input packets are also delayed on their way back, so the server is processing temporally delayed user commands. In addition, each client has a different network delay which varies over time due to other background traffic and the client's framerate. These time differences between server and client causes logical problems, becoming worse with increasing network latencies. In fast-paced action games, even a delay of a few milliseconds can cause a laggy gameplay feeling and make it hard to hit other players or interact with moving objects. Besides bandwidth limitations and network latencies, information can get lost due to network packet loss.
To cope with the issues introduced by network communication, the Source engine server employs techniques such as data compression and lag compensation which are invisible to the client. The client then performs prediction and interpolation to further improve the experience.
The server simulates the game in discrete time steps called ticks. By default, the timestep is 15ms, so 66.666... ticks per second are simulated, but mods can specify their own tickrate. During each tick, the server processes incoming user commands, runs a physical simulation step, checks the game rules, and updates all object states. After simulating a tick, the server decides if any client needs a world update and takes a snapshot of the current world state if necessary. A higher tickrate increases the simulation precision, but also requires more CPU power and available bandwidth on both server and client. The server admin may override the default tickrate with the -tickrate command line parameter, though tickrate changes done this way are not recommended because the mod may not work as designed if its tickrate is changed.
Clients usually have only a limited amount of available bandwidth. In the worst case, players with a modem connection can't receive more than 5 to 7 KB/sec. If the server tried to send them updates with a higher data rate, packet loss would be unavoidable. Therefore, the client has to tell the server its incoming bandwidth capacity by setting the console variable rate (in bytes/second). This is the most important network variable for clients and it has to be set correctly for an optimal gameplay experience. The client can request a certain snapshot rate by changing cl_updaterate (default 20), but the server will never send more updates than simulated ticks or exceed the requested client rate limit. Server admins can limit data rate values requested by clients with sv_minrate and sv_maxrate (both in bytes/second). Also the snapshot rate can be restricted with sv_minupdaterate and sv_maxupdaterate (both in snapshots/second).
The client creates user commands from sampling input devices with the same tick rate that the server is running with. A user command is basically a snapshot of the current keyboard and mouse state. But instead of sending a new packet to the server for each user command, the client sends command packets at a certain rate of packets per second (usually 30). This means two or more user commands are transmitted within the same packet. Clients can increase the command rate with cl_cmdrate. This will increase responsiveness but requires more outgoing bandwidth, too.
Game data is compressed using delta compression to reduce network load. That means the server doesn't send a full world snapshot each time, but rather only changes (a delta snapshot) that happened since the last acknowledged update. With each packet sent between the client and server, acknowledge numbers are attached to keep track of their data flow. Usually full (non-delta) snapshots are only sent when a game starts or a client suffers from heavy packet loss for a couple of seconds. Clients can request a full snapshot manually with the cl_fullupdate command.
Responsiveness, or the time between user input and its visible feedback in the game world, are determined by lots of factors, including the server/client CPU load, simulation tickrate, data rate and snapshot update settings, but mostly by the network packet traveling time. The time between the client sending a user command, the server responding to it, and the client receiving the server's response is called the latency or ping (or round trip time). Low latency is a significant advantage when playing a multiplayer online game. Techniques like prediction and lag compensation try to minimize that advantage and allow a fair game for players with slower connections. Tweaking networking setting can help to gain a better experience if the necessary bandwidth and CPU power is available. We recommend keeping the default settings, since improper changes may cause more negative side effects than actual benefits.
By default, without using server plugins, some servers tickrate cannot be altered for these games due to various reasons such as GoldSrc lacking the -tickrate command line parameter, or intentionally disabled in-code by Valve due to "server ops are abusing it" and/or "using -tickrate may cause server timing-related issues":
Users can install this server plugins to make the -tickrate command works again on games that have it disabled. Note that loading plugins would require -insecure (disabling VAC) for it to work.
All Source games / L4D & L4D2
By default, the client receives about 20 snapshot per second. If the objects (entities) in the world were only rendered at the positions received by the server, moving objects and animation would look choppy and jittery. Dropped packets would also cause noticeable glitches. The trick to solve this problem is to go back in time for rendering, so positions and animations can be continuously interpolated between two recently received snapshots. With 20 snapshots per second, a new update arrives about every 50 milliseconds. If the client render time is shifted back by 50 milliseconds, entities can be always interpolated between the last received snapshot and the snapshot before that.
Source defaults to an interpolation period ('lerp') of 100-milliseconds (cl_interp 0.1); this way, even if one snapshot is lost, there are always two valid snapshots to interpolate between. Take a look at the following figure showing the arrival times of incoming world snapshots:
The last snapshot received on the client was at tick 344 or 10.30 seconds. The client time continues to increase based on this snapshot and the client frame rate. If a new video frame is rendered, the rendering time is the current client time 10.32 minus the view interpolation delay of 0.1 seconds. This would be 10.22 in our example and all entities and their animations are interpolated using the correct fraction between snapshot 340 and 342.
Since we have an interpolation delay of 100 milliseconds, the interpolation would even work if snapshot 342 were missing due to packet loss. Then the interpolation could use snapshots 340 and 344. If more than one snapshot in a row is dropped, interpolation can't work perfectly because it runs out of snapshots in the history buffer. In that case the renderer uses extrapolation (cl_extrapolate 1) and tries a simple linear extrapolation of entities based on their known history so far. The extrapolation is done only for 0.25 seconds of packet loss (cl_extrapolate_amount), since the prediction errors would become too big after that.
Entity interpolation causes a constant view "lag" of 100 milliseconds by default (cl_interp 0.1), even if you're playing on a listenserver (server and client on the same machine). This doesn't mean you have to lead your aiming when shooting at other players since the server-side lag compensation knows about client entity interpolation and corrects this error.
Lets assume a player has a network latency of 150 milliseconds and starts to move forward. The information that the +FORWARD key is pressed is stored in a user command and send to the server. There the user command is processed by the movement code and the player's character is moved forward in the game world. This world state change is transmitted to all clients with the next snapshot update. So the player would see his own change of movement with a 150 milliseconds delay after he started walking. This delay applies to all players actions like movement, shooting weapons, etc. and becomes worse with higher latencies.
A delay between player input and corresponding visual feedback creates a strange, unnatural feeling and makes it hard to move or aim precisely. Client-side input prediction (cl_predict 1) is a way to remove this delay and let the player's actions feel more instant. Instead of waiting for the server to update your own position, the local client just predicts the results of its own user commands. Therefore, the client runs exactly the same code and rules the server will use to process the user commands. After the prediction is finished, the local player will move instantly to the new location while the server still sees him at the old place.
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