MarkTerrano

3 ms·

1.
by MarkTerrano 8y ago
The Command & Conquer approach (used by them and some others in the era of gold masters) was to release expansions to the game that incorporated the balance and other fixes as part of the release cycle of the game. In those days they d
2.
by MarkTerrano 8y ago
No, most games don't do it this way now. When I created this type of networking in 1994 it was to solve the particular problem of lots of units and low bandwidth. Now where bandwidth is much less consideration games typically use a
3.
by MarkTerrano 8y ago
LAN times were typically 14 to 20 msec ping on our blazing fast 10Mbits office lan at Ensemble Studios.
4.
by MarkTerrano 8y ago
Human cognitive reaction times are a lot mroe latent than connections are now. The quality of play percieved by the players in the studies I did back in the day was much more about consistency of responsiveness and not that direct number o
5.
by MarkTerrano 8y ago
People played lan games all the time with very low latency - I actually had to patch the code specially for the exhibition match at the AOK ReleaseToManufacture party because the Lan they were using had <1 msec latency - we had never had
6.
by MarkTerrano 8y ago
There were a lot of extra checks and code involved in the synchronized RNG - the results were loggable (to track down sync failures) for instance so bloating that up with every random fire flicker from a burning castle would have been crazy
7.
by MarkTerrano 8y ago
My personal favorite. !14 !14 !14
8.
by MarkTerrano 8y ago
(Original author here) - here was a really hard-to-find bug - in some instances more than one quantity of fish could be placed in the same location - that meant the game would work fine until someone fished that same fish the second time an
9.
by MarkTerrano 8y ago
(Author of the original article here) It was really pretty naive - nobody would plan for an RTS now without planning a series of patches to do the inevitable adjustments. Even for AOK we planned to patch and adjust. The 'general argu