3 ms·

The difference is substantial: There are books describing some standard practices now, third-party engines will at least include some basic networking functiona

The difference is substantial: There are books describing some standard practices now, third-party engines will at least include some basic networking functionality, and every worthwhile book on engines will at least mention what you need to do to reasonably support multiplayer. At the time that Tribes was developed, none of that reference material existed yet - you had to do your engineering from scratch, and there were plenty of major releases that shipped a multiplayer that was essentially broken or only viable on LAN - no Internet play, server browsers, or matchmaking. Today it's more common for multiplayer to only be broken in a limited set of ways, instead of "we are hacking away at a fundamentally wrong architecture for this problem".

ShroudedNight 10y ago
>Today it's more common for multiplayer to only be broken in a limited set of ways, instead of "we are hacking away at a fundamentally wrong architecture for this problem". While true generally, that doesn't preclude us from some epic failures. My understanding is that The Division implemented client-authoritative simulation and is now in a hopeless battle against those that would modify their client for an advantage...
- ChoGGi 10y ago
  No, it seems relativity free of cheaters. Once they brought out the ban hammer (as well as perma bans), the amount of cheaters seems to have dropped quite a lot.
- stephengillie 10y ago
  Half-Life had a major problem with this due to hit-scan weapons that insta-hit instead of using equations to make them travel through the environment. Tribes got around this with the laser sniper rifle by giving it an insanely fast velocity value, so it didn't insta-hit, but still hit basically during the same game tick.
stephengillie 10y ago
Matchmaking was a major hurdle. The game launched with an IRC client so you could connect to their IRC server and find friends or servers. They had an announcement system to announce in channel what server someone joined. IIRC, the Master Server was added in 1.04, alongside OpenGL support. Before then, it was Glide-only. Tribes was basically built for 3DFX cards.

ShroudedNight 10y ago

>Today it's more common for multiplayer to only be broken in a limited set of ways, instead of "we are hacking away at a fundamentally wrong architecture for this problem". While true generally, that doesn't preclude us from some epic failures. My understanding is that The Division implemented client-authoritative simulation and is now in a hopeless battle against those that would modify their client for an advantage...

ChoGGi 10y ago
No, it seems relativity free of cheaters. Once they brought out the ban hammer (as well as perma bans), the amount of cheaters seems to have dropped quite a lot.
stephengillie 10y ago
Half-Life had a major problem with this due to hit-scan weapons that insta-hit instead of using equations to make them travel through the environment. Tribes got around this with the laser sniper rifle by giving it an insanely fast velocity value, so it didn't insta-hit, but still hit basically during the same game tick.

stephengillie 10y ago

Matchmaking was a major hurdle. The game launched with an IRC client so you could connect to their IRC server and find friends or servers. They had an announcement system to announce in channel what server someone joined. IIRC, the Master Server was added in 1.04, alongside OpenGL support. Before then, it was Glide-only. Tribes was basically built for 3DFX cards.