Forum Overview :: Motherfucking News :: Also some anecdotal failures on these topics

[quote name="Senor Barborito"]Tribes used real multi-texturing back in the day - actually adding each bullethole to the texture IN RAM and then retransmitting the texture across the AGP pipe. Took them months with nVidia to get the game remotely playable on TNTs. Everquest in the early days had no parametric events, so every time you're in the faggy elf city and there are people riding up the elevator to the treetop forest, the elevator has to retransmit its coordinates with each new world update - prediction was only for players. It was kind of funny watching the elevator, just by itself, stuttering up and down as each new world-positional coordinate was transmitted. Even funnier was watching it literally HOP several feet each few frames if, say, 30 players got on it at once. The guys at 989 bragged in interview after interview about how great their netcode was, too - I read with anticipation, and when I saw that behavior I started laughing because I had started reading up on parametric events at age 17. Not as bad a fuckup as Anarchy Online's self-DDoS when they communicated all game traffic in TCP/IP - the ACKs drowning out the server and causing more traffic to be lost resulting in a constant downward spiral. They'd fire up the server again and for 5 minutes it'd be OK until WHAM and again and again . . . Maybe it's too easy to criticize because I've never written netcode but how can people *WHO ARE GETTING PAID* not know to a) use UDP, b) use Asynchronous Sockets for your client and Overlapped I/O for your server, and c) minimize amount of information sent where possible? You would think that MMORPG programmers would understand that netcode is MORE IMPORTANT than graphics for their product, and that most of the physics/AI energies of a 'normal' game can be transferred to it - but in many products there is little evidence of this happening and to some extent the opposite. [/rant] --SB[/quote]