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The Internet Sucks: Or, What I Learned Coding X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter (1999)

150 points by rcsorensen 13y ago

malbs 13y ago
There is a whole generation of people who haven't played XVT and that is a real shame. XVT has aged well over the course of time. I once dreamed of the day LucasArts was going to release XVT for the 21st century. Once they hosed that studio I gave up on the dream.
- m_mueller 13y ago
  I'm having high hopes for both Star Citizen and the indie game Rogue System - the later one is very simulation heavy and could bring back the warm feeling of getting a damaged craft under control, only on steroids this time. None will have the SW licence, but hey - can't have everything, right? Btw. how come nobody really cashed in on the Battlestar Galactica hype?
  - malbs 13y ago
    I worry that SC is way too ambitious. I never really thought Wing Commander ever delivered on it's hype, and I think SC is more of the same. I look forward to being proven wrong though. BSG online has a bit of a following, but being browser based I gave it a miss
    - m_mueller 13y ago
      WC4 is still my favorite spacesim - don't know about the hype beforehand, but for me it was just a very well told and engaging space opera.
      - conception 13y ago
        WC3 is one of my favorite games of all time. Everything was done so well in that game, for its time.
        ygra 13y ago
        Not to mention that the cutscenes look much better than the Wing Commander movie ;-) I still have that game on six CDs somewhere; I wonder whether they're still unscratched enough to be playable ...
- vitovito 13y ago
  I'm told the new Galactic Starfighter expansion for Star Wars: The Old Republic has a lot of the things people liked about XVT in it. It's free-to-play now, might be worth checking out: http://www.swtor.com/galactic-starfighter http://www.swtor.com/galactic-starfighter Disclaimer: used to work on that project, still have friends who do.
  - aluhut 13y ago
    Sadly it has not. I was very hoping for this. But the (few) maps are horrible for a "space" sim. The MMO fighter/item-part killed the rest of my possible motivation. I really hope Disney will come up with something real in the future. I've been building Maps vor TIE-Fighter, X-Wing and XvT back in their days for The Emperors Hammer (that still exists out there!) so I hope they won't forget about the creativity in the community. SWTOR forgot completly.
- codezero 13y ago
  I felt like Freelancer was a good, more recent game, that was a lot like XVT. I guess even that's 11 years old now :( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freelancer_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freelancer_(video_game)
  - m_mueller 13y ago
    Well, except it replaced any level of skill you needed in XvT with clicky-the-thingy-oh-looky-it-explodes. XvT was the Quake of spacesims, garnered with some real sim elements like tuning your energy consumers. No game since has delivered on this again - for some reason all publishers thought there is no market for this - looking at Robert's kickstarter I think this has clearly been proven wrong now.
- 72deluxe 13y ago
  Did you ever play X-Wing or Tie Fighter? Tie Fighter was an incredible game. You could spend days in the training simulator. X-Wing Alliance was also exceptionally good, including Em-Kay shouting "Check your mail!" and "There's no point even TRYING any more!"
  - riquito 13y ago
    Tie Fighter was marvellous. All in 3 floppy disks if I remember correctly.
    - tragic 13y ago
      As someone who's always hated the Star Wars movies (except Empire, natch), I've nevertheless lost a lot of my life and worn out at least two joysticks to Tie Fighter. Fantastic piece of work.
      - gknoy 13y ago
        I have yet to find a joystick that is half as nice as the (Microsoft!) one I had back then. Now it seems like either the springs are too hard or force feedback makes the dead zone all sloppy. I feel like the Goldilocks of joysticks.
  - malbs 13y ago
    Yeah, all 3! I loved those games
- cstuder 13y ago
  I'm looking forward to Enemy Starfigher, which make some references to TIE Fighter on the one side, and Homeworld on the other side. http://enemystarfighter.com/ http://enemystarfighter.com/
mbetter 13y ago
Why link to the second page of an article?
jamesaguilar 13y ago
The article says (paraphrase) that > On some connections one in five packets are dropped And then shortly afterwards that > This would only fail if two consecutive packets were dropped, and this seemed unlikely. Hrm. I think I'm beginning to see the problem here, and it isn't the internet. Still, fun to read about the battle scars of remote gaming's early days.
- neilk 13y ago
  That part made no sense to me either. I think their requirements were to transmit every action the other player(s) took, so it seems like things would still be failing all over the place. But maybe occasionally insane results are better than occasionally blocked.
- forrestthewoods 13y ago
  These guys were at the forefront of online game technology back in '97. And not only that but they were also willing to share what they learned. Mistakes, warts, and all. There's something magical about the internet where any technical post results in a slew of commenters trying to show they are smarter than the topic author. Good job.
- GauntletWizard 13y ago
  You've destroyed an important bit of information in your paraphrasing. The literal quote: > It turned out that on some connections, about every fifth packet we sent would just disappear into the Ethernet. Due to the way packet-queueing works, it is actually a reasonable failure-expectation. If the network is on the edge of congestion, a packet will be dropped as there's no space in the queue, but another packet will be sent and clear space in the queue before a second packet has a chance to be lost. In many near-congestion failure modes, it is literally every fifth or tenth or twentieth packet that gets dropped. This is actually the basis of how TCP's congestion-control works, too.
barbs 13y ago
> When we started the X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter project, our goal was to create the first multi-player space combat simulator to be playable over the Internet. They obviously hadn't heard of Netrek, the third multiplayer internet game ever, first released in 1988. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek
- fshaun 13y ago
  Ah, memories. My inspiration to study CS, though probably fortunate that it was mostly dead by sophomore year, or my college GPA would have been much worse. Netrek's macro system was another feature I wish were more widely adopted in games. Receiver-configurable distresses (RCDs) allowed a sender to publish named kinds of messages ("help at location, intercepting X, ship status, bombing planet, etc.) but receivers control the formatting. So I can set up my client to only show your hull+fuel for general distress calls but more data based on the kind of message.
  - peter94707 13y ago
    Actually, I _loved_ netrek... it was an inspiration! It was more RTS than flight sim tho. But it was quite possibly the first MMO as well! I never played it over a modem, tho, just on a LAN... which is definitely not the same thing as a 28K internet connection circa 1999. But that game was genius, and quite possibly _would_ have worked over slow, lossy and highly latent connections, I never tried it.
patmcguire 13y ago
Always incredible to read about how problems were first solved. Things like Lesson Two: TCP is evil, don't use TCP for a game... Lesson Three: Use UDP... and the like are all "of course" solutions now, but they weren't then. How do you build something fast and reliable over something slow and creaky? Who knows. The shoulders of giants have gotten a lot taller since then.
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  TCP is very widely used by multiplayer gaming today. It turns out you can just tweak it a little bit and it works fine.
  - stoptalkingshit 13y ago
    It works just fine.. for non-realtime games (and has been widely used for such games since forever). I've done the tests - you cannot just "tweak" it, and even if you could you'd be relying on the networking stack to do something it's not intended to do.
    - forrestthewoods 13y ago
      You might be surprised. World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2 are both TCP. It's pretty common for MMOs. It can also work well for some types of RTS games where the added latency isn't a major issue.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - lucian1900 13y ago
        They're not real-time, though, in the sense that a delayed message is as good as no message. The tolerance is high enough that a few delays usually don't affect gameplay.
    - RyanZAG 13y ago
      All flash games use TCP (as you can't use UDP in flash). There are many realtime flash games. Many MMORPGs use TCP for compatibility reasons: they are very much real-time, especially something like PVP in world of warcraft, etc. Guild Wars also uses TCP and is very much a 'twitch' based realtime game as well.
rosser 13y ago
We were pretty pleased with ourselves, and thought we must be very clever. Here be dragons, my friend.
jtchang 13y ago
I remember trying to get this game to load with himem.sys. Ugh.
- tanzam75 13y ago
  > I remember trying to get this game to load with himem.sys. Ugh. Not this game. You're probably remembering TIE Fighter. X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter ran on Windows 9x and required DirectX. That's why the article was talking about DirectPlay.
Kiro 13y ago
> Lesson two: TCP is evil. Does this mean WebSockets are unusable for most type of multiplayer games?
- Ygg2 13y ago
  Not as such, you can use TCP, just be aware that it won't guarantee that your packet will arrive in order given. http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/udp-vs-tcp/ http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/udp...
- exDM69 13y ago
  > > Lesson two: TCP is evil. > Does this mean WebSockets are unusable for most type of multiplayer games? Yes, it means that WebSockets are unusable for real-time multiplayer games like fast paced FPS games. That may not be "most" multiplayer games, though. If you're planning a game on top of WebSockets (or TCP), the gameplay should be tolerant of 3-5 times the network round trip time.
tsunamifury 13y ago
XVT had a two fold problem, half was the poor internet implementation but the other half was that the product didn't fulfill the genre's expectations. Its predecessors (Tie Fight and X-Wing before it) had large, complex and well written story lines which following engaging missions paths. This was 80% of the game, as the graphics were relatively poor compared to sprite-based shooters of the time. I remember the deep disappointment of booting XVT for the first time and realizing it had no story, and a terrible UX. I was launched into an offline lobby and only had the option to play some very uninteresting and un-engaging missions. Put that on top of a completely unplayable multiplayer mode, it ended being a poor decision to make a game based on a technology they couldn't support -- when a perfectly valid offline story mode would have made up for it fine. So instead they charged another 49.99 on top of 69.99 for an add-on (and people complain about IAP) that gave the features the original box promised.
- pilif 13y ago
  If you like the space shooter genre and you like them to have an interesting story line, then also take a look at Freespace and Freespace 2. For me, those two are the pinnacle of the space-shooter genre, even more so as Freespace 2 was open sourced and attracted a very large community of not just programmers but also artists which resulted in a game that's still being active developped with quite current graphics and sound. You can get the game on gog.com and use the Java-based[1] installer to get the open source engine and assets installed [1]: http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/FreeSpace_Open_Installer http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/FreeSpace_Open_Inst...
- Argorak 13y ago
  I don't share your opinion. The multiplayer is so great that we still gather together every year and fly missions for a night. Balance of Power added great coop missions that needed team-play and sticking to your role. The most interesting thing - historically - about XvT was that it was one of the first games that completely skipped single-player campaigns for multiplayer. Everyone screamed "madness" back then. See where it got us ;).
terranstyler 13y ago
I loved the series, I remember in X-Wing there was a complete campaign where you start with hit'n'run tactics against some containers (!) and end in an ambush and the first kill of an ISD. This storyline made you feel hopelessly outnumbered and you just stood (flew) there in awe whenever something bigger than a Nebulon B arrived at the battle scene. Your AI wingmen just panicked and ran and so did you, possibly directing all your shield and weapon energy to your engines if you were unfortunate enough to fly a Y-Wing. Later on you could count on corvettes and cruisers that reinforced your side (though they were always late) and you felt the tide of the war turning. I never got that feeling again, maybe because I am older. Or maybe because DX 11.1b support is much more important for a game and story is considered overrated.
- pjgomez 13y ago
  I loved this series too. I even remember reading this very article back in the day when I was learning about game development. Sometimes when I go to my old room at my parent's house and I see the game boxes in the shelf, I am tempted to install at least one of them and try to get back that feeling you talk about. I never have done it because I know deep down it will never be the same
morkfromork 13y ago
This is a 15 year old article. What has this guy done since then?
- LordIllidan 13y ago
  http://www.gamasutra.com/view/authors/518707/Peter_Lincroft.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/authors/518707/Peter_Lincroft....
  - morkfromork 13y ago
    The last one of those games was released 14 years ago. Nothing since then.
    - to3m 13y ago
      A google search suggests he no longer works in video games.
slacka 13y ago
It took the video game industry nearly a decade for most games to come out with network code as effective as X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter's and QuakeWorld's at hiding latency, packet loss, and bandwidth limits. Even recently, many fighting and RTS's games struggle on poor connections. Until I played Killer Instinct, the only decent fighting games that I've run across have been based on the GGPO. Judging from my own and others experience, KI's network code is this generation's equivalent of QuakeWorld. I hope the developers of KI publish a paper like this one, detailing their technique.
JacobAldridge 13y ago
Single page version - http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131781/the_internet_sucks_or_what_i_.php?print=1 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131781/the_internet_su...
- arsemouflon 13y ago
  Thank you! Those multiple-page madness is even more rageworthy when using an adblocker.
cclogg 13y ago
For anyone interested, this is also a great article about multiplayer networking: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3094/1500_archers_on_a_288_network_.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3094/1500_archers_on_a... Currently working on an iOS project using a similar system, which so far works great. A challenge I am facing right now is pathfinding in conjunction with synchronous multiplayer. Pathfinding can take a decent chunk of cpu time on lower-end devices, but you can't really multi-thread it since you need all players to calculate the same paths on the same simulation ticks lol... so might come down to rate-limiting the amount of units that can re-path on a given sim-tick. Making multiplayer games is fun lol... :)
TheZenPsycho 13y ago
it makes me wonder if there's a way of encoding some kind of extremely compressed lossy version of the entire game state that can patch each player's state to be incrementally more "correct". Then on slow connections you're still keeping positions broadly where they should be, while faster connections will bring the game state to a more precisely correct state. How would you create such a packet without knowledge of each player's differences? Just a thought experiment I was having. What if the game state was represented as a very large N dimensional vector. The most significant bits are sent until the players report that they match. then the next significant bits. then the next after that. Adapt the granularity of an update to the current throughput. If a player disconnects for 10, 20 seconds their game state re-syncs smoothly and gradually instead of in a jump cut?
ggambetta 13y ago
If you find this interesting, you may want to take a look at a series of articles and a live demo I wrote on the topic of client-server networking for games (http://gabrielgambetta.com/fpm1.html http://gabrielgambetta.com/fpm1.html) which is very often cited on gamedev.stackexchange and similar places. It's more about First-Person Shooters, but most of it applies anyway. X-Wing, Tie Fighter (and its mission packs) and X-Wing Alliance were awesome. XvT not so much :(
epmatsw 13y ago
Their implemented solutions at the end remind me of Halo 2, where players would slide and warp around if they were too laggy and where a bad enough connection would boot you out into a blue screen until it recovered (or kicked out the player with the worst connection).
scott_s 13y ago
It was quite common for a re-sent packet to be dropped, and we saw several cases where the original packet and 4 or 5 re-sends of that packet would all be dropped. We were re-sending so many packets, we were starting to exceed the bandwidth of the modem, and then the latency would start to climb, and all hell would break loose. That is exactly why TCP has the "slow start" protocol. I am sympathetic to their problems, though. I understand that the implementations of TCP they had access to had way too much latency, and that back then, there probably wasn't much tuning one could do on the outside. What they did is a clever hack (message n has a copy of n-1) that takes advantage of the fact that they don't have to send much data in total.
jcurbo 13y ago
This is timely as I have been replaying X-Wing lately (specifically, the Collector's Series version that uses the XvT engine, aka xwing95). X-Wing was one of the first PC games I played when it first came out (I was in middle school) and thus I have an endearing love of space sims. (I have high hopes for Star Citizen and Enemy Starfighter.) I think an interesting project would be creating a modern graphics engine that can parse and run the various X-Wing game data files. The XvT and X-Wing Alliance engines run ok on modern Windows but still have some compatibility issues (graphics glitches, etc). If a modern graphics engine (written in Unity or some such) could capture the look and feel of the X-Wing games, that would be great. It would be even better if it was an official game and not someone's open source project that never gets finished :(
- Associat0r 13y ago
  Elite: Dangerous with its scientifically accurate 1:1 scale Milky Way galaxy looks the most promising to me. http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous_FAQ http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous_FAQ
- karlgrz 13y ago
  +1 for turning me on to xwing95. Thank you!
DLWormwood 13y ago
As well written as this article is, I do have a problem with its tone. The writer seems willing ignorant of why the Internet “sucks” for gaming; it was not designed for real time small packet transmission. Most of TCP’s design, in particular, was intended to facilitate the transmission of comparatively sizable files over FTP, NNTP, and SMTP. Even stuff like IRC was designed not to be so concerned about timeliness that the chatlog on each end would match up exactly.
- hapless 13y ago
  The internet wasn't designed for high-latency, high-compression modem sessions. TCP works just fine over a 56 kbps leased line. It's terrifying on a 56k home modem, despite similar "bandwidth." The leased line has 50 ms of very predictable latency and 56 kbps of very predictable throughput. The 56k PPP session has an unpredictable 300-500 ms of latency and a constantly varying capacity of 2.4 to 56 kbps thanks to high noise and ugly compression schemes. Lots of things that worked perfectly well on the relatively crude internet of the 1980s were real pains in the ass on "high-tech" modems in the 1990s. -- edit: a specific example would be X11. An emacs X11 session was totally usable on a leased line or ISDN, despite the low bandwidth, because they delivered low latency and packet loss. It was hellish on any kind of a home dial-up.
  - mcguire 13y ago
    Don't forget the "Eternal September" effect. During the late '90's, I was a sysadmin for a fairly major computer science department. One of my periodic tasks, and my test of Internet health, was to download and build gcc. When I started, getting gcc took a while. By 1999 and later, when the Internet had been discovered, downloading gcc took several hours and frequently several retries.
mcguire 13y ago
I realize this is about game development, where missions and what-not are a major chunk of development. But still, I think most of the problems here are basic engineering failures: if you have a big infrastructure issue, get that issue right before you go crazy on other stuff. From the article: "We actually used the 'synchronous' version for quite awhile. It was good enough to test with, so finishing the network code was considered a lower priority than the other issues we needed to address at that stage of development." And the result was, rather predictably: "When we finally came back to the network code we were behind schedule, and that affected some of the decisions we make later in the process. And it meant we were absolutely committed to the complexity of the missions, and the user interface."
- 300bps 13y ago
  I got to the third page before I realized how clueless the person who wrote that is. First of all, 1999 was 15 years ago but since I started an ISP from the ground up in 1996, I know for a fact that the Internet wasn't quite the dark ages at that time he tries to make it seem. 28.8k modems were around in '94 and by '96 to '97, 56k were standard. And maybe I was just in a lucky area, but I had a Comcast cable modem in 1996 (http://corporate.comcast.com/news-information/timeline http://corporate.comcast.com/news-information/timeline). Getting beyond that, he complains about everything. TCP sucks, UDP sucks, the Internet sucks. A clue for anyone with introspection is when you think everything but you sucks, it's actually you that sucks. For an example of much more highly skilled engineers working on an arguably even bigger engineering problem in 1996 on a much larger game, read here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3094/1500_archers_on_a_288_network_.php?print=1 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3094/1500_archers_on_a...
  - Rizz 13y ago
    One correction, the 1999 is when the article was written, the game was created mostly in 1996 and released early 1997. Your point still stands of course.
Johnwbh 13y ago
I remember loving the original X-Wing and TIE fighter games. Does anyone know why space combat games dropped so dramatically in popularity?
peter94707 13y ago
LOL! I wrote that for a presentation at the Game Developers Conference way back when. It was really a post-mortem, where the point is to show others what mistakes we made so that they wont repeat them. Anyway, its kind of flattering to see it come to life again... like some kind of Frankenstein internet cat. Thanks to all the positive commenters, and all you haters can fall into a timewarp and have to suffer through 28K modem hell all over again. ;) Or worse yet, be forced to watch Titanic...
georgeecollins 13y ago
I remember making a PC game in 1998 with multiplayer.. we had to handle 500 ms lag in an action game! Later I worked on a game that kept three versions of the simulated in memory (the old confirmed world, the new confirmed worlds, and an interpolation) to deal with lag while keeping in sync. You don't know how easy you have it now!

150 points by rcsorensen 13y ago

malbs 13y ago

There is a whole generation of people who haven't played XVT and that is a real shame. XVT has aged well over the course of time. I once dreamed of the day LucasArts was going to release XVT for the 21st century. Once they hosed that studio I gave up on the dream.

m_mueller 13y ago
I'm having high hopes for both Star Citizen and the indie game Rogue System - the later one is very simulation heavy and could bring back the warm feeling of getting a damaged craft under control, only on steroids this time. None will have the SW licence, but hey - can't have everything, right? Btw. how come nobody really cashed in on the Battlestar Galactica hype?
- malbs 13y ago
  I worry that SC is way too ambitious. I never really thought Wing Commander ever delivered on it's hype, and I think SC is more of the same. I look forward to being proven wrong though. BSG online has a bit of a following, but being browser based I gave it a miss
  - m_mueller 13y ago
    WC4 is still my favorite spacesim - don't know about the hype beforehand, but for me it was just a very well told and engaging space opera.
    - conception 13y ago
      WC3 is one of my favorite games of all time. Everything was done so well in that game, for its time.
      - ygra 13y ago
        Not to mention that the cutscenes look much better than the Wing Commander movie ;-) I still have that game on six CDs somewhere; I wonder whether they're still unscratched enough to be playable ...
vitovito 13y ago
I'm told the new Galactic Starfighter expansion for Star Wars: The Old Republic has a lot of the things people liked about XVT in it. It's free-to-play now, might be worth checking out: http://www.swtor.com/galactic-starfighter http://www.swtor.com/galactic-starfighter Disclaimer: used to work on that project, still have friends who do.
- aluhut 13y ago
  Sadly it has not. I was very hoping for this. But the (few) maps are horrible for a "space" sim. The MMO fighter/item-part killed the rest of my possible motivation. I really hope Disney will come up with something real in the future. I've been building Maps vor TIE-Fighter, X-Wing and XvT back in their days for The Emperors Hammer (that still exists out there!) so I hope they won't forget about the creativity in the community. SWTOR forgot completly.
codezero 13y ago
I felt like Freelancer was a good, more recent game, that was a lot like XVT. I guess even that's 11 years old now :( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freelancer_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freelancer_(video_game)
- m_mueller 13y ago
  Well, except it replaced any level of skill you needed in XvT with clicky-the-thingy-oh-looky-it-explodes. XvT was the Quake of spacesims, garnered with some real sim elements like tuning your energy consumers. No game since has delivered on this again - for some reason all publishers thought there is no market for this - looking at Robert's kickstarter I think this has clearly been proven wrong now.
72deluxe 13y ago
Did you ever play X-Wing or Tie Fighter? Tie Fighter was an incredible game. You could spend days in the training simulator. X-Wing Alliance was also exceptionally good, including Em-Kay shouting "Check your mail!" and "There's no point even TRYING any more!"
- riquito 13y ago
  Tie Fighter was marvellous. All in 3 floppy disks if I remember correctly.
  - tragic 13y ago
    As someone who's always hated the Star Wars movies (except Empire, natch), I've nevertheless lost a lot of my life and worn out at least two joysticks to Tie Fighter. Fantastic piece of work.
    - gknoy 13y ago
      I have yet to find a joystick that is half as nice as the (Microsoft!) one I had back then. Now it seems like either the springs are too hard or force feedback makes the dead zone all sloppy. I feel like the Goldilocks of joysticks.
- malbs 13y ago
  Yeah, all 3! I loved those games
cstuder 13y ago
I'm looking forward to Enemy Starfigher, which make some references to TIE Fighter on the one side, and Homeworld on the other side. http://enemystarfighter.com/ http://enemystarfighter.com/

mbetter 13y ago

Why link to the second page of an article?

jamesaguilar 13y ago

The article says (paraphrase) that > On some connections one in five packets are dropped And then shortly afterwards that > This would only fail if two consecutive packets were dropped, and this seemed unlikely. Hrm. I think I'm beginning to see the problem here, and it isn't the internet. Still, fun to read about the battle scars of remote gaming's early days.

neilk 13y ago
That part made no sense to me either. I think their requirements were to transmit every action the other player(s) took, so it seems like things would still be failing all over the place. But maybe occasionally insane results are better than occasionally blocked.
forrestthewoods 13y ago
These guys were at the forefront of online game technology back in '97. And not only that but they were also willing to share what they learned. Mistakes, warts, and all. There's something magical about the internet where any technical post results in a slew of commenters trying to show they are smarter than the topic author. Good job.
GauntletWizard 13y ago
You've destroyed an important bit of information in your paraphrasing. The literal quote: > It turned out that on some connections, about every fifth packet we sent would just disappear into the Ethernet. Due to the way packet-queueing works, it is actually a reasonable failure-expectation. If the network is on the edge of congestion, a packet will be dropped as there's no space in the queue, but another packet will be sent and clear space in the queue before a second packet has a chance to be lost. In many near-congestion failure modes, it is literally every fifth or tenth or twentieth packet that gets dropped. This is actually the basis of how TCP's congestion-control works, too.

barbs 13y ago

> When we started the X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter project, our goal was to create the first multi-player space combat simulator to be playable over the Internet. They obviously hadn't heard of Netrek, the third multiplayer internet game ever, first released in 1988. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek

fshaun 13y ago
Ah, memories. My inspiration to study CS, though probably fortunate that it was mostly dead by sophomore year, or my college GPA would have been much worse. Netrek's macro system was another feature I wish were more widely adopted in games. Receiver-configurable distresses (RCDs) allowed a sender to publish named kinds of messages ("help at location, intercepting X, ship status, bombing planet, etc.) but receivers control the formatting. So I can set up my client to only show your hull+fuel for general distress calls but more data based on the kind of message.
- peter94707 13y ago
  Actually, I _loved_ netrek... it was an inspiration! It was more RTS than flight sim tho. But it was quite possibly the first MMO as well! I never played it over a modem, tho, just on a LAN... which is definitely not the same thing as a 28K internet connection circa 1999. But that game was genius, and quite possibly _would_ have worked over slow, lossy and highly latent connections, I never tried it.

patmcguire 13y ago

Always incredible to read about how problems were first solved. Things like Lesson Two: TCP is evil, don't use TCP for a game... Lesson Three: Use UDP... and the like are all "of course" solutions now, but they weren't then. How do you build something fast and reliable over something slow and creaky? Who knows. The shoulders of giants have gotten a lot taller since then.

RyanZAG 13y ago
TCP is very widely used by multiplayer gaming today. It turns out you can just tweak it a little bit and it works fine.
- stoptalkingshit 13y ago
  It works just fine.. for non-realtime games (and has been widely used for such games since forever). I've done the tests - you cannot just "tweak" it, and even if you could you'd be relying on the networking stack to do something it's not intended to do.
  - forrestthewoods 13y ago
    You might be surprised. World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2 are both TCP. It's pretty common for MMOs. It can also work well for some types of RTS games where the added latency isn't a major issue.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - lucian1900 13y ago
      They're not real-time, though, in the sense that a delayed message is as good as no message. The tolerance is high enough that a few delays usually don't affect gameplay.
  - RyanZAG 13y ago
    All flash games use TCP (as you can't use UDP in flash). There are many realtime flash games. Many MMORPGs use TCP for compatibility reasons: they are very much real-time, especially something like PVP in world of warcraft, etc. Guild Wars also uses TCP and is very much a 'twitch' based realtime game as well.

rosser 13y ago

We were pretty pleased with ourselves, and thought we must be very clever. Here be dragons, my friend.

jtchang 13y ago

I remember trying to get this game to load with himem.sys. Ugh.

tanzam75 13y ago
> I remember trying to get this game to load with himem.sys. Ugh. Not this game. You're probably remembering TIE Fighter. X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter ran on Windows 9x and required DirectX. That's why the article was talking about DirectPlay.

Kiro 13y ago

> Lesson two: TCP is evil. Does this mean WebSockets are unusable for most type of multiplayer games?

Ygg2 13y ago
Not as such, you can use TCP, just be aware that it won't guarantee that your packet will arrive in order given. http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/udp-vs-tcp/ http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/udp...
exDM69 13y ago
> > Lesson two: TCP is evil. > Does this mean WebSockets are unusable for most type of multiplayer games? Yes, it means that WebSockets are unusable for real-time multiplayer games like fast paced FPS games. That may not be "most" multiplayer games, though. If you're planning a game on top of WebSockets (or TCP), the gameplay should be tolerant of 3-5 times the network round trip time.

tsunamifury 13y ago

XVT had a two fold problem, half was the poor internet implementation but the other half was that the product didn't fulfill the genre's expectations. Its predecessors (Tie Fight and X-Wing before it) had large, complex and well written story lines which following engaging missions paths. This was 80% of the game, as the graphics were relatively poor compared to sprite-based shooters of the time. I remember the deep disappointment of booting XVT for the first time and realizing it had no story, and a terrible UX. I was launched into an offline lobby and only had the option to play some very uninteresting and un-engaging missions. Put that on top of a completely unplayable multiplayer mode, it ended being a poor decision to make a game based on a technology they couldn't support -- when a perfectly valid offline story mode would have made up for it fine. So instead they charged another 49.99 on top of 69.99 for an add-on (and people complain about IAP) that gave the features the original box promised.

pilif 13y ago
If you like the space shooter genre and you like them to have an interesting story line, then also take a look at Freespace and Freespace 2. For me, those two are the pinnacle of the space-shooter genre, even more so as Freespace 2 was open sourced and attracted a very large community of not just programmers but also artists which resulted in a game that's still being active developped with quite current graphics and sound. You can get the game on gog.com and use the Java-based[1] installer to get the open source engine and assets installed [1]: http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/FreeSpace_Open_Installer http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/FreeSpace_Open_Inst...
Argorak 13y ago
I don't share your opinion. The multiplayer is so great that we still gather together every year and fly missions for a night. Balance of Power added great coop missions that needed team-play and sticking to your role. The most interesting thing - historically - about XvT was that it was one of the first games that completely skipped single-player campaigns for multiplayer. Everyone screamed "madness" back then. See where it got us ;).

terranstyler 13y ago

I loved the series, I remember in X-Wing there was a complete campaign where you start with hit'n'run tactics against some containers (!) and end in an ambush and the first kill of an ISD. This storyline made you feel hopelessly outnumbered and you just stood (flew) there in awe whenever something bigger than a Nebulon B arrived at the battle scene. Your AI wingmen just panicked and ran and so did you, possibly directing all your shield and weapon energy to your engines if you were unfortunate enough to fly a Y-Wing. Later on you could count on corvettes and cruisers that reinforced your side (though they were always late) and you felt the tide of the war turning. I never got that feeling again, maybe because I am older. Or maybe because DX 11.1b support is much more important for a game and story is considered overrated.

pjgomez 13y ago
I loved this series too. I even remember reading this very article back in the day when I was learning about game development. Sometimes when I go to my old room at my parent's house and I see the game boxes in the shelf, I am tempted to install at least one of them and try to get back that feeling you talk about. I never have done it because I know deep down it will never be the same

morkfromork 13y ago

This is a 15 year old article. What has this guy done since then?

LordIllidan 13y ago
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/authors/518707/Peter_Lincroft.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/authors/518707/Peter_Lincroft....
- morkfromork 13y ago
  The last one of those games was released 14 years ago. Nothing since then.
  - to3m 13y ago
    A google search suggests he no longer works in video games.

slacka 13y ago

It took the video game industry nearly a decade for most games to come out with network code as effective as X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter's and QuakeWorld's at hiding latency, packet loss, and bandwidth limits. Even recently, many fighting and RTS's games struggle on poor connections. Until I played Killer Instinct, the only decent fighting games that I've run across have been based on the GGPO. Judging from my own and others experience, KI's network code is this generation's equivalent of QuakeWorld. I hope the developers of KI publish a paper like this one, detailing their technique.

JacobAldridge 13y ago

Single page version - http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131781/the_internet_sucks_or_what_i_.php?print=1 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131781/the_internet_su...

arsemouflon 13y ago
Thank you! Those multiple-page madness is even more rageworthy when using an adblocker.

cclogg 13y ago

For anyone interested, this is also a great article about multiplayer networking: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3094/1500_archers_on_a_288_network_.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3094/1500_archers_on_a... Currently working on an iOS project using a similar system, which so far works great. A challenge I am facing right now is pathfinding in conjunction with synchronous multiplayer. Pathfinding can take a decent chunk of cpu time on lower-end devices, but you can't really multi-thread it since you need all players to calculate the same paths on the same simulation ticks lol... so might come down to rate-limiting the amount of units that can re-path on a given sim-tick. Making multiplayer games is fun lol... :)

TheZenPsycho 13y ago

it makes me wonder if there's a way of encoding some kind of extremely compressed lossy version of the entire game state that can patch each player's state to be incrementally more "correct". Then on slow connections you're still keeping positions broadly where they should be, while faster connections will bring the game state to a more precisely correct state. How would you create such a packet without knowledge of each player's differences? Just a thought experiment I was having. What if the game state was represented as a very large N dimensional vector. The most significant bits are sent until the players report that they match. then the next significant bits. then the next after that. Adapt the granularity of an update to the current throughput. If a player disconnects for 10, 20 seconds their game state re-syncs smoothly and gradually instead of in a jump cut?

ggambetta 13y ago

If you find this interesting, you may want to take a look at a series of articles and a live demo I wrote on the topic of client-server networking for games (http://gabrielgambetta.com/fpm1.html http://gabrielgambetta.com/fpm1.html) which is very often cited on gamedev.stackexchange and similar places. It's more about First-Person Shooters, but most of it applies anyway. X-Wing, Tie Fighter (and its mission packs) and X-Wing Alliance were awesome. XvT not so much :(

epmatsw 13y ago

Their implemented solutions at the end remind me of Halo 2, where players would slide and warp around if they were too laggy and where a bad enough connection would boot you out into a blue screen until it recovered (or kicked out the player with the worst connection).

scott_s 13y ago

It was quite common for a re-sent packet to be dropped, and we saw several cases where the original packet and 4 or 5 re-sends of that packet would all be dropped. We were re-sending so many packets, we were starting to exceed the bandwidth of the modem, and then the latency would start to climb, and all hell would break loose. That is exactly why TCP has the "slow start" protocol. I am sympathetic to their problems, though. I understand that the implementations of TCP they had access to had way too much latency, and that back then, there probably wasn't much tuning one could do on the outside. What they did is a clever hack (message n has a copy of n-1) that takes advantage of the fact that they don't have to send much data in total.

jcurbo 13y ago

This is timely as I have been replaying X-Wing lately (specifically, the Collector's Series version that uses the XvT engine, aka xwing95). X-Wing was one of the first PC games I played when it first came out (I was in middle school) and thus I have an endearing love of space sims. (I have high hopes for Star Citizen and Enemy Starfighter.) I think an interesting project would be creating a modern graphics engine that can parse and run the various X-Wing game data files. The XvT and X-Wing Alliance engines run ok on modern Windows but still have some compatibility issues (graphics glitches, etc). If a modern graphics engine (written in Unity or some such) could capture the look and feel of the X-Wing games, that would be great. It would be even better if it was an official game and not someone's open source project that never gets finished :(

Associat0r 13y ago
Elite: Dangerous with its scientifically accurate 1:1 scale Milky Way galaxy looks the most promising to me. http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous_FAQ http://elite-dangerous.wikia.com/wiki/Elite:_Dangerous_FAQ
karlgrz 13y ago
+1 for turning me on to xwing95. Thank you!

DLWormwood 13y ago

As well written as this article is, I do have a problem with its tone. The writer seems willing ignorant of why the Internet “sucks” for gaming; it was not designed for real time small packet transmission. Most of TCP’s design, in particular, was intended to facilitate the transmission of comparatively sizable files over FTP, NNTP, and SMTP. Even stuff like IRC was designed not to be so concerned about timeliness that the chatlog on each end would match up exactly.

hapless 13y ago
The internet wasn't designed for high-latency, high-compression modem sessions. TCP works just fine over a 56 kbps leased line. It's terrifying on a 56k home modem, despite similar "bandwidth." The leased line has 50 ms of very predictable latency and 56 kbps of very predictable throughput. The 56k PPP session has an unpredictable 300-500 ms of latency and a constantly varying capacity of 2.4 to 56 kbps thanks to high noise and ugly compression schemes. Lots of things that worked perfectly well on the relatively crude internet of the 1980s were real pains in the ass on "high-tech" modems in the 1990s. -- edit: a specific example would be X11. An emacs X11 session was totally usable on a leased line or ISDN, despite the low bandwidth, because they delivered low latency and packet loss. It was hellish on any kind of a home dial-up.
- mcguire 13y ago
  Don't forget the "Eternal September" effect. During the late '90's, I was a sysadmin for a fairly major computer science department. One of my periodic tasks, and my test of Internet health, was to download and build gcc. When I started, getting gcc took a while. By 1999 and later, when the Internet had been discovered, downloading gcc took several hours and frequently several retries.

mcguire 13y ago

I realize this is about game development, where missions and what-not are a major chunk of development. But still, I think most of the problems here are basic engineering failures: if you have a big infrastructure issue, get that issue right before you go crazy on other stuff. From the article: "We actually used the 'synchronous' version for quite awhile. It was good enough to test with, so finishing the network code was considered a lower priority than the other issues we needed to address at that stage of development." And the result was, rather predictably: "When we finally came back to the network code we were behind schedule, and that affected some of the decisions we make later in the process. And it meant we were absolutely committed to the complexity of the missions, and the user interface."

300bps 13y ago
I got to the third page before I realized how clueless the person who wrote that is. First of all, 1999 was 15 years ago but since I started an ISP from the ground up in 1996, I know for a fact that the Internet wasn't quite the dark ages at that time he tries to make it seem. 28.8k modems were around in '94 and by '96 to '97, 56k were standard. And maybe I was just in a lucky area, but I had a Comcast cable modem in 1996 (http://corporate.comcast.com/news-information/timeline http://corporate.comcast.com/news-information/timeline). Getting beyond that, he complains about everything. TCP sucks, UDP sucks, the Internet sucks. A clue for anyone with introspection is when you think everything but you sucks, it's actually you that sucks. For an example of much more highly skilled engineers working on an arguably even bigger engineering problem in 1996 on a much larger game, read here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3094/1500_archers_on_a_288_network_.php?print=1 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3094/1500_archers_on_a...
- Rizz 13y ago
  One correction, the 1999 is when the article was written, the game was created mostly in 1996 and released early 1997. Your point still stands of course.

Johnwbh 13y ago

I remember loving the original X-Wing and TIE fighter games. Does anyone know why space combat games dropped so dramatically in popularity?

peter94707 13y ago

LOL! I wrote that for a presentation at the Game Developers Conference way back when. It was really a post-mortem, where the point is to show others what mistakes we made so that they wont repeat them. Anyway, its kind of flattering to see it come to life again... like some kind of Frankenstein internet cat. Thanks to all the positive commenters, and all you haters can fall into a timewarp and have to suffer through 28K modem hell all over again. ;) Or worse yet, be forced to watch Titanic...

georgeecollins 13y ago

I remember making a PC game in 1998 with multiplayer.. we had to handle 500 ms lag in an action game! Later I worked on a game that kept three versions of the simulated in memory (the old confirmed world, the new confirmed worlds, and an interpolation) to deal with lag while keeping in sync. You don't know how easy you have it now!