Shit, mentioning the T1 really made me have a minor flashback. Yeah. Back in the 90s computer processing power varied dramatically between users. Like when I got a 386 around 1990 it had a whooping 40mb of space and 1mb of RAM. It was a lot for the time. We never had to run anything directly off disks. But just 3 years later when Doom came out (and I remember the launch of Doom) i was surprised that we couldn’t have it because it needed 4mbs of RAM. Also our computer wasn’t fast enough anymore so when we DID finally get it years later we needed to use the smaller screen option to get it to run fast enough otherwise it was too choppy to play.
Someone playing Quake, a game that only came out a few years later, with that kind of machine you’re talking about would dominate. Not because of skill, but simply that his comp has the speed that can allow him to act and react much faster than his opponents.
It would be like if you took a modern formula one race car from 2025 to a formula one race in 1925. A medicore driver would win, but not for skill.
Someone playing Quake, a game that only came out a few years later, with that kind of machine you’re talking about would dominate. Not because of skill, but simply that his comp has the speed that can allow him to act and react much faster than his opponents.
Exactly.
In that sense, ‘pay to win’ has always been a thing lol.
You sound probably a bit older than me, but I can’t tell you how many times in the 90s and early 00s that I legitimately lost games due to having a garbage tier ping to basically everywhere, and a shitty eMachine, and everyone else just acted like none of that mattered and I was just whining.
Then, surprise, me and the online boys all jump into a server where they all have pings of 80, I have a ping of 200, and then they’re all mad that I cant hit anybody because enemies are rubber banding around like fucking DBZ characters for me.
… Then I do a LAN party with local friends and utterly dominate, routinely.
I’m younger than both of ya’ll but I remember playing COD Modern Warfare 2 on my Xbox 360 with a 27” CRT TV and a connection that put me a good few tenths of a second behind everyone else(estimating off of killcam footage).
I cleaned up most of the time. I had to get good and I didn’t know at first that it was my connection so I just started going wild lol. I only played hardcore mode and used fast, light weapons so I could react and correct more quickly. Probably couldn’t pull it off these days but it’s a fun memory.
Yeah… a whole lot of gamers… seem to… think they know how game design works, think they know how to solve technical problems…
And well now in the last decade we see the buckets of slop games on steam made by such idiots, confirming that indeed, 95% of them have no clue about anything.
I was an early beta tester for Project Reality, which has now become its own studio, Squad is literally Project Reality just rebuilt in UE 4 to higher quality, because EA wouldn’t liscense out Frostbite to them.
But thats all a tangent to hopefully lend some creedence to when I say: solving network lag and having good netcode is actually extremely complicated and difficult, even still today.
We still see AAA studios fucking up the basics of a lot of netcode stuff in mmo/rpg typr games, where they just make way, way too much shit clientside authoritative, and then have to spend a year or two redesigning the entire game.
This, in turn, is why third party kernel anti cheats have taken off so much, because game devs just fucking give up at making a reasonably secure networked game.
Meanwhile Valve figured this shit out literal decades ago, with highly efficient netcode, and a mostly server side AC solution.
It isn’t possible to stop 100% of cheaters.
It is possible to stop 99.9% of them by designing your game and netcode well.
But that is apparently too hard, so basically the entite industry has outsourced it and/or solved it with massively inefficient and privacy/security compromising AC.
Back in the 90s my friend and I would play Descent against each other via modem. I had a 100Mhz processor, he had a 66Mhz processor. If I came in blasting with a rapid fire weapon his machine couldn’t render fast enough and he’d get blown up.
Shit, mentioning the T1 really made me have a minor flashback. Yeah. Back in the 90s computer processing power varied dramatically between users. Like when I got a 386 around 1990 it had a whooping 40mb of space and 1mb of RAM. It was a lot for the time. We never had to run anything directly off disks. But just 3 years later when Doom came out (and I remember the launch of Doom) i was surprised that we couldn’t have it because it needed 4mbs of RAM. Also our computer wasn’t fast enough anymore so when we DID finally get it years later we needed to use the smaller screen option to get it to run fast enough otherwise it was too choppy to play.
Someone playing Quake, a game that only came out a few years later, with that kind of machine you’re talking about would dominate. Not because of skill, but simply that his comp has the speed that can allow him to act and react much faster than his opponents.
It would be like if you took a modern formula one race car from 2025 to a formula one race in 1925. A medicore driver would win, but not for skill.
Exactly.
In that sense, ‘pay to win’ has always been a thing lol.
You sound probably a bit older than me, but I can’t tell you how many times in the 90s and early 00s that I legitimately lost games due to having a garbage tier ping to basically everywhere, and a shitty eMachine, and everyone else just acted like none of that mattered and I was just whining.
Then, surprise, me and the online boys all jump into a server where they all have pings of 80, I have a ping of 200, and then they’re all mad that I cant hit anybody because enemies are rubber banding around like fucking DBZ characters for me.
… Then I do a LAN party with local friends and utterly dominate, routinely.
-.-
I’m younger than both of ya’ll but I remember playing COD Modern Warfare 2 on my Xbox 360 with a 27” CRT TV and a connection that put me a good few tenths of a second behind everyone else(estimating off of killcam footage).
I cleaned up most of the time. I had to get good and I didn’t know at first that it was my connection so I just started going wild lol. I only played hardcore mode and used fast, light weapons so I could react and correct more quickly. Probably couldn’t pull it off these days but it’s a fun memory.
Hehe sounds about right.
Yeah… a whole lot of gamers… seem to… think they know how game design works, think they know how to solve technical problems…
And well now in the last decade we see the buckets of slop games on steam made by such idiots, confirming that indeed, 95% of them have no clue about anything.
I was an early beta tester for Project Reality, which has now become its own studio, Squad is literally Project Reality just rebuilt in UE 4 to higher quality, because EA wouldn’t liscense out Frostbite to them.
But thats all a tangent to hopefully lend some creedence to when I say: solving network lag and having good netcode is actually extremely complicated and difficult, even still today.
We still see AAA studios fucking up the basics of a lot of netcode stuff in mmo/rpg typr games, where they just make way, way too much shit clientside authoritative, and then have to spend a year or two redesigning the entire game.
This, in turn, is why third party kernel anti cheats have taken off so much, because game devs just fucking give up at making a reasonably secure networked game.
Meanwhile Valve figured this shit out literal decades ago, with highly efficient netcode, and a mostly server side AC solution.
It isn’t possible to stop 100% of cheaters.
It is possible to stop 99.9% of them by designing your game and netcode well.
But that is apparently too hard, so basically the entite industry has outsourced it and/or solved it with massively inefficient and privacy/security compromising AC.
Back in the 90s my friend and I would play Descent against each other via modem. I had a 100Mhz processor, he had a 66Mhz processor. If I came in blasting with a rapid fire weapon his machine couldn’t render fast enough and he’d get blown up.
Descent… man I haven’t played that or magic carpet in ages. I need a trip down memory lane later tonight…