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The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

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Re: The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

#61

Post by atonse »

impostervt wrote: post #58

This game ate my life in college. My friends and I founded tribalwar.com in late 1999, and I spent the next 3 years learning how to code websites. I was never that great at the game, but the skills I learned coding websites led to my first professional job.

This whole thread was a walk down memory lane. It also consumed my life in late high school and college.

Thanks for tribalwar. It was my HN before HN, and my slashdot before slashdot. Lots of hours spent on that site. I was Zoidberg in the community.

Re: The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

#62

Post by Duhck »

impostervt wrote: post #58

This game ate my life in college. My friends and I founded tribalwar.com in late 1999, and I spent the next 3 years learning how to code websites. I was never that great at the game, but the skills I learned coding websites led to my first professional job.

As a devoted member of TribalWar (thanks so much!) / avid T1 player, its awesome to see you on HN!

My handle was Duhck :)

Tribes was... magical. Tight knit player community, active modding community, amazing map design and tournament play.

Team Rabbit, Arena, and 10v10 CTF consumed the majority of my time from '98-'06

Re: The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

#63

Post by rdw »

silverlight wrote: post #14

Random but related: does anyone know of a good library (in C#, Javascript, or really anything higher-level than C preferably) that implements this? By "this" I mean a UDP-based system capable of sending both "it's stale when it's sent" data that can be dropped if it's lost and "this must be delivered" messages that will be re-sent if not delivered? I would need it for a Unity project, so if it's Unity-ready already t…

https://github.com/lidgren/lidgren-network-gen3

This is a very mature library. Supports Unity despite not having an asset store package.

It's got the same sort of channels/reliability model that enet and RakNet have, just implemented in C#.

Re: The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

#64

Post by NamTaf »

drops wrote: post #41
MrZongle2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in retrospect, even Tribes 2 wasn't that much of a disappointment. The hard-core types that frequented Tribalwar complained incessantly about it, and I grant you that the weeks following its release were bumpy, but there were a lot of people who enjoyed the game considerably. Now Tribes:Vengeance and the free-to-play nonsense that is Tribes Ascend? Those have brought the franchise to a near-standstill.

Tribes Ascend wasn't that bad during its early beta stages, though. I think that was late 2011 / early 2012. It went downhill with the consecutive patches following the game's release in April 2012.

The devs made some utterly idiotic decisions regarding how they wanted the game to work and it ended up having a whole load of unintended negative effects.

If you're falling above 72km/hr and jetpack, they do nothing and you actually fall faster. Under 72 it decelerates as you'd expect. This is purely because they tried to impose variable physics based on your velocity, which in turn was a bandaid to address other issues.

They really shot themselves in the foot and only as of about 6 months ago - if that - has a small subgroup of the old devs been allowed to start unravelling the mess and make it more like Tribes 1. Before that, they basically ceased work on the game and abandoned it in favour of throwing all their devs at their next cash grab endeavour, Smite.

Re: The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

#66

Post by lallysingh »

15155 wrote: post #60
lallysingh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebRTC Data Channels http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webrtc/datachannels/ let you freely mix reliable and unreliable data. I donno if there's any bindings from the webrtc library to unity yet. EDIT: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/47846

Tangentially: does anyone know of any great server-side implementations of this? So that a regular server could be a WebRTC peer?

... it's peer to peer ... the server acts like a peer... the same code can run for both peers ...

So you can choose any webrtc binding for any language you use server side.

Re: The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

#67

Post by blakeyrat »

NamTaf wrote: post #64
drops wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tribes Ascend wasn't that bad during its early beta stages, though. I think that was late 2011 / early 2012. It went downhill with the consecutive patches following the game's release in April 2012.

The devs made some utterly idiotic decisions regarding how they wanted the game to work and it ended up having a whole load of unintended negative effects. If you're falling above 72km/hr and jetpack, they do nothing and you actually fall faster . Under 72 it decelerates as you'd expect. This is purely because they tried to impose variable physics based on your velocity, which in turn was a bandaid to address other i…

SMITE's actually a really good game though with a very fair and affordable payment system.

Criticize them for not allocating enough staff to maintain Tribes Ascend, sure, but it's unfair to call SMITE a cash-grab.

Re: The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

#68

Post by NamTaf »

blakeyrat wrote: post #67
NamTaf wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The devs made some utterly idiotic decisions regarding how they wanted the game to work and it ended up having a whole load of unintended negative effects. If you're falling above 72km/hr and jetpack, they do nothing and you actually fall faster . Under 72 it decelerates as you'd expect. This is purely because they tried to impose variable physics based on your velocity, which in turn was a bandaid to address other i…

SMITE's actually a really good game though with a very fair and affordable payment system. Criticize them for not allocating enough staff to maintain Tribes Ascend, sure, but it's unfair to call SMITE a cash-grab.

Fair; I called it such because I was bitter that they completely and unapologetically dropped T:A just as it was getting some momentum behind it simply to divert everyone onto SMITE. It felt like the next trend came along (MOBA) so they just completely abandoned T:A without a second thought.

Re: The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

#69

Post by robertfw »

STRML wrote: post #46
stephengillie wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skiing was a bug - friction didn't apply to players while the jump animation was playing, but gravity equations did, so players slid downhill a bit. During beta, players learned to hammer their spacebar to maintain this frictionless state, skiing incredibly fast. Eventually, a script was released to automate this, repeating the jump when spacebar was held down; other games might consider this a cheat, but the communi…

Skiing was a bug in Starsiege:Tribes - it was a feature in Tribes 2 and arguably made the whole series into what it is. The community eagerly awaits a reboot that can even come close to challenging the technical & operational superiority of T1 & T2. What masterpieces they were.

https://www.playmidair.com/ is leading contender. lots of devs were t1/t2 comp players

Re: The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

#70

Post by 15155 »

lallysingh wrote: post #66
15155 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangentially: does anyone know of any great server-side implementations of this? So that a regular server could be a WebRTC peer?

... it's peer to peer ... the server acts like a peer... the same code can run for both peers ... So you can choose any webrtc binding for any language you use server side.

Yes, sure. Incidentally, I haven't found any decent WebRTC bindings that aren't tightly wound to browsers.
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