Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

staniks.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 172 posts

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

#111

Post by Demiurge »

That was a fun game, I loved the demo.

I think some of the extrapolation might have also inspired optimizations made in CPMA mod for Quake3, which to this day, I think, has the best netcode of all games. You can actually compete with 100 ping, in it, which is completely unplayable in OSP or vanilla Q3. I don’t think any other game even attempts to be so optimized for competitive online FPS.

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

#112

Post by josefresco »

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

Counter-Strike was/is popular because gameplay is awesome. Players stayed long enough that even "toaster PCs" could run the engine. It was never "cutting edge" even after major upgrades.

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

#114

Post by tombert »

I loaded up the original Serious Sam The First Encounter about a year ago, and that game never ceases to amaze me with how much they were able to squeeze out of relatively low-powered 2002 computers. I had it as a kid, and I had never seen so many enemies on the screen at once.

Even now, the game mostly holds up pretty well and it still kind of impresses me.

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

#115

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Yet games with 10x the bandwidth struggle to support that many enemies. It only just occurred to me: an increase of technological resources actually has a reversing effect on the efficiency and creativity of computer science. As bandwidth, storage, memory and compute has gotten bigger, there is an inverse response in the software that makes it slower, more bloated, and less capable, per discrete unit of resource. Call it the Benjamin Button software design effect

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

#116

Post by BirAdam »

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…

Serious Sam was one of my uncle’s favorite games (along with Duke Nukem 3D). He was a hugely important figure in my life, and playing through his favorites is a good way to keep connected to my memories of him. So, thanks to you and your coworkers! Excellent game, excellent multiplayer, and very good memories.

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

#118

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

stavros wrote: post #75
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…

I love how there's an article about how some legendary game was made, and someone in the comments casually goes "oh yeah, I built that, fun times". It's great.

HN is wonderful for that. I once commented on an article about Brave Browser that it was an ad extortion racket, and Brendan Eich showed up to call me an asshole. Good times!

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

#120

Post by nick7376182 »

fileeditview wrote: post #82
robertlagrant wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. See also: first headcrab fight with only a crowbar in Half-life.

This is THE one thing I remember from playing Half-life :)

It's quite memorable in VR as well! If you get the chance I highly recommend playing HL Alyx with a valve index setup.

It was on par with my first playthrough of the original HL so many years ago.

Post reply on HN