The follow-up to the 2D multiplayer shooter Soldat, by Michal Marcinkowski. Link-Dead is a hardcore realistic side-view multiplayer only combat game.
Death to the nonbelievers! Finally I can drink a beer for my efforts!
This is a video showing the new netcode. First I run it without any lag just to show how it works “perfect”. Then I run Quality of Service, a program that simulates a real internet network, to simulate a 400-500ms ping and 25% out-of-order (dropped) packets. This is an environment nobody should attempt playing. Watch the video to see how it works. For the whole week I was attempting to make a very precise algorithm to deal with smoothness. It worked on paper but not in the game. The animations and movement were very choppy. Finally I made a heuristic-like approach. It seems an approximation is always better than the real thing. This seems to correspond with Carmack’s experiences (http://www.fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/johnc-log.aug.htm). Although I use a completely different algorithm than in any FPS game. I update the players only based on the key strokes and mouse controls. A full update based on the servers data is made only if the position or other important variables change “significantly”. The measure of this significance is a matter of a good guess. This method “just works” as you see on the video. The errors appear because of packet loss. But they are very quickly fixed and the game can continue.
very good job man!hardest thing is done? good luck!
A very interesting video. Thanks for posting.