GameTracking-Dota2 VS Protobufs

SteamDB has spotted another update for the game: https://steamdb.info/app/570/history/

Any dota files change are available on Github. Just read it there https://github.com/SteamDatabase/GameTracking-Dota2

From steamdb https://github.com/SteamDatabase/GameTracking-Dota2/commit/0e70e697ca8c7b5e2762f7739a3b21f307518aa3 I found:

Dota 2 is using srt2 and has been since at least 2016, if you look the very first commit to https://github.com/SteamDatabase/GameTracking-Dota2/tree/6aa033b24151a742ec7c59b3b9ce90d10d693bef it is probably possible to download older Dota 2 depots from steam and verify exactly when the srt1 to srt2 update happened, and then tinfoil hat your way to source 2 coming to CSGO anytime now.

The subtick architecture gives you more opportunities to provide the server with input. In the case of your game running at 300fps, the game will divide the framerate by the tickrate (64) which is 300 / 64 = 4,6. Rounding the number down gives you now 4 slots for input. The actual logic is a bit more complex and takes into account the last time input was sent, but we can ignore that here. Now you can send up to 4 inputs (for example, shooting) to the server that is handling the current tick. In addition, and this is the important part, every history entry also contains timing information at which fraction of the tick your input happened (it also contains information about your shooting position, fps and interp - see: https://github.com/SteamDatabase/Protobufs/blob/master/csgo/cs_usercmd.proto - but it is unclear how much of that information is going to stay for subtick and how much is for debugging purposes).

Take a look at the protobufs. https://github.com/SteamDatabase/Protobufs/blob/master/csgo/cs\_usercmd.proto https://github.com/SteamDatabase/Protobufs/blob/master/csgo/usercmd.proto

We are still going to need another packet regardless, assuming these packets are usercmds as seen in here, every packet only holds a single view angle.

They removed them from the public facing stuff in 2020 when a bunch of other report changes went in, but chances are they still have the information behind the scenes.

If you want to dig into it, there's a github that tracks the protobufs that dota (and other valve games) use to communicate and you can learn more about protobufs from google's docs (it's a google protocol for serializing data efficiently)

Here is the source for the messages https://github.com/SteamDatabase/Protobufs/blob/dcc77c38203d8edb11db067919e4bca1e44762f9/webui/service_community.proto. You have to compile these yourself as they aren't in the latest version of anything. Then when sending the actual UM you can just send this info steamid=owner.id64, comment_thread_type=10, # I'm not sure where this number is from, but it works count=1000 # the number of comments to return Go wild (if applicable).