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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

#151

Post by jasonvorhe »

tombert wrote: post #114

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.

Yeah, Doom Eternal struggles with like a dozen demons in one room and fps are immediately halved. It's such a pity. It's actually a decent game but if you can't keep somewhat consistent fps in a shooter game where every second counts, you'll just grind down the nerves and patience of your user base.

I know many people love Doom Eternal and other shooters with similar issues. Maybe I'm just sensitive to these kinds of frustrations.

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

#152

Post by opyate »

> But why do we see smooth movement and animation?

>

> Interpolation. Serious Engine interpolates between the current and the previous game tick based on time passed between. Try opening the in-game console (~ key) and typing this to see how the game looks and feels without interpolation:

>

> /net_bLerping=0

>

> It's kind of like playing a modern console exclusive.

That list bit made me spit my tea out, I laughed so hard.

Great game. A staple of our LAN parties, what, 25-ish years ago now?

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

#153

Post by tombert »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #151
tombert wrote: post #114

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.

Yeah, Doom Eternal struggles with like a dozen demons in one room and fps are immediately halved. It's such a pity. It's actually a decent game but if you can't keep somewhat consistent fps in a shooter game where every second counts, you'll just grind down the nerves and patience of your user base. I know many people love Doom Eternal and other shooters with similar issues. Maybe I'm just sensitive to these kinds of…

Grand Theft Auto IV for the PC, in its initial release, would slow down pretty horribly if there was more than like four cars on the road. Even with a reasonably powerful computer, it was pretty bad to play (though updates did increase performance considerably). I remember when I first played it thinking "you know, Serious Sam came out like seven years ago on crappier hardware and it could handle way more stuff while maintaining a fast frame rate"

It's obviously not apples to apples, the models in GTA IV are much more detailed, but it was still pretty disappointing to play initially.

It's still my favorite GTA game, but I ended up playing through the 360 version my first time around.

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

#154

Post by stavros »

VikingCoder wrote: post #149
stavros wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahah oh man, do you have a link? I'd love to have an opinion on who's right.

Internal company discussion boards... /sigh The gist of it is... The person who wrote v2 of a thing got a lot of shit, because there were a lot of "cons" that could have been predicted and mitigated. I complained about them getting shit. Making a new thing is hard, and yes, there were "cons" but there are an enormous number of "pros," and you can't always block progress trying to enumerate and mitigate all of the "co…

Oof, that sounds like some dysfunction. Can't really argue with adoption, though.

Pity this was in internal forums, I thought it was on HN.

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

#155

Post by wizzwizz4 »

racional wrote: post #140
throwawayqqq11 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The majority of the Torah is the Oral Torah: the Written Torah is only five books (and they're not huge books, either).

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

#156

Post by m463 »

test1235 wrote: post #110
m463 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inte…

lol, that's right!

"Wait, that guys is taller than BUILDINGS!"

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

#157

Post by chainingsolid »

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…

Some games that used a determinism based architecture, will actually provide immediate feed back faked on the client and then some how make that work when the real stuff happens later. See Starcraft providing instant audio response when moving units or for Factorio: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-83 https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-412 (second half of post)

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

#158

Post by chainingsolid »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #74
robertlagrant wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to work on a lock-step thing like that one day. Seems such a satisfying (and testable) design constraint to work with.

Their friday facts are very worth reading, not just for people that play computer games, it is interesting for any developer. If I remember correctly they had issues with parts behaving slightly differently on different platforms, which then lead to sync issues in multiplayer. I have no experience here, but I guess the difficulty of such a strategy comes from ordering "events" in a game loop.

More than just ordering! Most floating point logic in compilers cares about speed, precision, then reproducibility (optimization can/will cause debug vs release builds to give different results)... Then you have to control inputs to the sim, you didn't think of (memory allocator, network timing behavior, random number gen)

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

#159

Post by [deleted] »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #118
stavros wrote: post #75

Earlier 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.

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!

[deleted]

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

#160

Post by account42 »

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!"

Also every time you find a secret with some nice loot you just know that once you turn around it's going to spawn some more "presents" on you.
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