Croatia is one of those countries i can't point out on the map but routinely churns out amazing innovation.
Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections
131–140 of 172 posts
Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not so much easier but enables a different class of cheats in games where players don't have perfect information, even with other schemes there is normally enough information leaked that similar cheats are possible. OTOH using a deterministic simulation prevents a whole class of other cheats.
What class of cheats are prevented in deterministic simulation but possible with a dedicated server running a state synchronization netcode model? I don't think any...
Well, unless you don't trust the server.
Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections
#133Serious 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…
In the late 90s, I managed the EA Tech Support website. The support/QA* teams would have massive after-hours gaming sessions playing Serious Sam. It was the only FPS that ran consistently on our work PCs, and it was a ton of fun.
* At least at that time, EA QA and Tech Support had a lot of overlap; support guys would be come in-house beta testers in the Summer when they were trying to get games done for the holidays and do Tech Support in the Winter around Christmas when the calls went up.
Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections
#134Yet 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. Cal…
Do you have a number for "that many enemies"? If article is giving one, I couldn't find it. There are plenty of modern games that is multiplayer and supports enemy numbers that I would consider "massive". Or massive number of players if that is that matters.
Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you know a good way of searching through my entire comment history I'm happy to search for it, but it was some years ago, and I post several comments a day, so it may be a tall order to manually page through my history.
You can use the sort of official HN search engine like this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections
#136I 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.
I once commented something to the effect of “that must have sucked” on a story about debugging a weird error on crash bandicoot and in comes the developer to tell me “yes, it did suck.”
Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections
#137Starseige Tribes was massive and ridiculously fun on a 56k connection.
There is a whitepaper exploring similar netcode concepts that was written by the Tribes developers:
https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/tribes-networking-model.pdf
Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections
#138Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Hacker News is so special for that. I posted a question about Django a while back and sure enough, in rolled the framework's creator to answer it.
That's great! Which creator was it? Simon Willison is very active here, I don't know if Adrian Holovaty ever was.
Re: Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The history of religion contradicts your point. Judaism emerged in the most illiterate area of its time. I think "immunity for brainwashing" is the wrong term. Back in the simple days people got less exposed to, how ever you would like to call it. The first ever printed western book was the f'ing bible and people in the 2000s thought the internet would spark a new era of education, you know, printing press 2.0 and su…
Judaism emerged in the most illiterate area of its time.
How do we know this?
The very fact of its emergence (and reliance on written teachings) speaks to the very opposite.