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Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections

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Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections

#101

Post by hypertexthero »

ThatPlayer wrote: post #94
LarsDu88 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this due to the heterogeneity of client hardware?

I think another issue with lockstep is that for it to work, each client needs all the input data from all the other clients to be able to simulate the next step, otherwise the simulations become out of sync. So how does the simulation handle both your input, and another clients input that comes in 100ms later? If you just pause until you get their input, your game is effectively pausing and running at 10 steps/second…

This is all way above my understanding, but:

Recently I’ve been playing Arma Reforger with friends online on a dedicated server, and when driving vehicles the collision physics are off, especially when driving fast, making the whole scene “teleport” forward, with frames lost and the vehicle reappearing in unexpected positions.

I wonder if this is related to this type of code. The game is technically out of early access, but there’s lots to be added still on the roadmap.

Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections

#102

Post by Woshiwuja »

epolanski wrote: post #100
Woshiwuja wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zeb89, buddy you werent on youtube 15 years ago?

Always been, never seen/heard of. I guess there's plenty of popular content on the internet or elsewhere I could name you and you'd be like "never heard of it". Even extremely popular one.

i guess it depends on how old you are

Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections

#104

Post by epolanski »

Woshiwuja wrote: post #102
epolanski wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always been, never seen/heard of. I guess there's plenty of popular content on the internet or elsewhere I could name you and you'd be like "never heard of it". Even extremely popular one.

i guess it depends on how old you are

37

Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections

#105

Post by kalleboo »

nottorp wrote: post #97
kalleboo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't that even worse before? Games like Warcraft and Doom played across Intel x86, Motorola 680x0 and PowerPC

Did Warcraft 1 and Doom have cross platform multiplayer back then?

I don't know about WC1/Doom1 but WC2/Doom 2 on the Mac also supported IPX to play against PCs in addition to the native AppleTalk support they had. The only time I ever saw IPX on a Mac.

Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections

#106

Post by whizzter »

javaunsafe2019 wrote: post #103

Do I get it wright - the reason to implement a custom protocol above udp instead of using tcp was the benefit to have a certain amount of packets that didn’t need to be acknowledged?

Packetloss with TCP creates unnecessary latency for games.

The OS TCP stack basically will show data in a sequential fashion to the userspace code, this greatly simplifies things like a HTTP stream but in a game it also means that even if 9 out of 10 packets have arrived, if the lost one is the first packet then we need to wait for another roundtrip or more before seeing all the packets because the first one still needs to be re-sent before anything is seen.

With UDP and custom handling you can just proceed to render and show everything as it shows up, asking for a re-send will at worst cause re-simulation in an engine like SS's but for most parts the player won't notice unless something significant was lost.

For those that played Quake 1 before Quake World the difference was staggering, a Q1 session would freeze on packet-losses when the client tried to catch up(hard when a significant portion of the bandwidth was already used on the modem) whilst QW mostly kept on trucking with some jerks (they probably made other improvements also).

Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections

#107

Post by Q6T46nT668w6i3m »

skhr0680 wrote: post #33
raggi wrote: post #19

Serious Sam was always a killer LAN party game. Not necessarily because it was the sexiest title of the day, or what anyone had planned. Serious Sam won the LAN party because even when every other game died under some driver issue, thermal issue, update problem, whatever, you’d load Serious Sam and it would just work. This continued through the later series too, hell of someone’s machine was completely dead in the wa…

Serious Sam looked amazing for the shitty hardware it would run (FAST) on. On a similar note, Counter-Strike never looked good, but was popular for a long time because it ran great on toaster PCs

I think this also explains the continued success of World of Warcraft.

Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections

#108

Post by ilamont »

robertlagrant wrote: post #61
immortan wrote: post #48

I was one the developers responsible for implementing the netcode on Serious Sam. We often slept under the desks in the offices at croteam after lurking usenet. One post in particular described the QuakeWorld prediction system which inspired us. That night we coded a simplistic mvp as a colleague (hi dan) tested it over an old 486 nix machine acting as a router that we could simulate lag with. This was well before th…

Why did you make the guys with exploding heads who run at you and their scream gets louder as they approach? I can still hear them.

The Witch in Left 4 Dead. Whoever cooked up the audio for that deserves an Oscar.

https://youtu.be/C71U4CxD_J8?si=dvaDyhYCKtb5f069

Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections

#109

Post by pimlottc »

Akronymus wrote: post #59
siberianbot wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found devastating that in The Talos Principle 2 they had dropped their own engine and used Unreal Engine instead.

Talos 2 was a great game. Except the awful TAA. Made some of the meta puzzles almost impossible for me, because I literally couldn't see certain things.

I had to google TAA:

> Q: What is TAA and why should I care?

A: TAA stands for Temporal Anti-Aliasing. It's used to fix/clean up aliasing in games. The different kinds of aliasing in games are edge aliasing, shader aliasing, texture aliasing, temporal aliasing and specular aliasing. Edge aliasing makes edges of objects look jagged (also called as the staircase effect). Temporal aliasing is the shimmer of objects which are either small in nature, or which are far in the distance such as power lines, railings, stairs, balconies, antennas etc... You should get the idea.

https://old.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/oi0v86/taa_on_vs_t...

Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections

#110

Post by test1235 »

m463 wrote: post #40
raggi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the many speaker sound of “aaaaaaaaaaaaah” was delightful

I remember getting through some battle and coming on a room FULL of ammo of every kind. First time, it was awesome. But gradually ammo caches started making me say "Yikes!"

noone's mentioned the gargantuan size of the bosses!

playing co-op, running with your mates across the plains, blasting rocket trails into the distant horizon across the gorgeous clear blue skies at the biggest boss you've ever seen, with the pumping music thumping the whole way through, while you're trying to fend off what feels like hundreds of mobs ... I don't think I've experienced anything of that scale and intensity since ... one of my greatest of all time

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