- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Heyyo,
Posted by: ROBO LEADER
Please, do not bring up PC games with online coop. Those games were built from the ground up on a PC, not an Xbox, and were made with coop in mind. I tried to make the point that online coop is just not going to happen in my first post. My question, in a nutshell, is why is there no offline coop? Zeph says it is about resources, I do understand that it would require more resources to render two screens at once, I understand that, but if you have what Vista requires to work optimally, that really shouldn't be much of an issue. I simply want to just be able to play with my friends on campaign, I do not own an Xbox, or a 360, but my friend does, and both of us prefer to play coop rather then single player, so why cut it? Sure, you can push some more graphics on older hardware, but when at the same time you are taking out a core element of the gameplay, you are making a poor compromise.[/quote]
Yo robo, ever heard of good ol' Serious Sam 1st and 2nd Encounters? (not Serious Sam 2) cause SS 1st & 2nd Encounters supported up to four freakin' players split screen on the same PC! It was awesome playing with buds. 2 USB keyboards and mice, and 2 gamepads. Hella-crazy fun on the laptop at school with buds during breaks, lmao. Hell, even online was badass cause of this.. that's right, when you join a server, it asks you how many on this comp wanna play, so you can do 4 pc's with 4 players on each... mucho-crazy..o..... well, you get the idea. ;)
Sadly, like Halo1 and 2 for PC, Split-screen gaming on Serious Sam 2 was cut out for time-restraints on release and graphics abilities...
Posted by: Zeph
Posted by: Oni Ryu
Why do all these Halo engines suck so badly that they can't put in online coop? I mean c'mon, Unreal was released 9 years ago and it supports online coop for up to 16 friggin players!
LOL!. You do know that the engine the Halo series has been developed on is one of the best engines out there? 16 player games is a design choice. It was done that way from a technological choice for the console, it was chosen for map design, and it was chosen simply because that's what they wanted.
Halo engine for xbox was plenty amazing yeah, but due to time-restraints on the PC version, it didn't turn out as good. Still good, but not great.
I still don't understand what the problem is because many older games support online coop (BF1942 for example).
Battlefield1942 had fakeclient support, thus, bots for multiplayer.
Easier said than done is correct. With motion prediction in PC/Custom Edition, any and all actors in a multiplayer scenario will not work. You might see it working on the xbox because it's running on the same processor/memory. And there are no commands for the server to update a client with an actors position and actions. The very nature of Halo's AI is against it. Why do you think fights never happen the same way in Halo except for a few in the first level? Also, there simply aren't any calls the server can make to inquire the location and state (other than dead/alive) to send to clients. It's been looked into and it can not be done without rewriting the entire engine to accommodate it. Even if you did that, you'd have a latency/bandwidth issue.
multiplayer ai could easily have been done with halo1, once again, would need proper fakeclient support, and fakeclient's, if done correctly, take next-to-no bandwith. If you ever tried Quake3Arena with bots on a server, they take maybe half the amount of bandwith of players, if even half, probably more like 1/4th the bandwith of a player, cause bots are more predictable to the game than players cause no matter how advanced they are, they are still done by script, unlike players which the server needs to interpolate their actions in order for it to be as smooth as possible gameplay. For re-writing the engine, once again, doesn't need to happen, they just need to add onto the engine. They need to add proper fakeclient support. Halo2 has moving conveyor belts in multiplayer, but I'm unsure if it has elevators, if not, then they would probably have to add code to properly synchronize elevators incase a level requires one like the Halo campaigns have, otherwise those would be lag-tastic like the Doom 3 coop mods (then again, the Doom3 Netcode is hella worse than HaloPC's netcode... default is 4 player deathmatch and it's still a 4 player lag-fest by default..).
Speaking of Doom3, it had fakeclient support too. The bot's weren't built for multiplayer. And the game didn't have proper elevator (moving parts of level) syncrhonization abilties, and Doom3's ai was pretty random as fights weren't always the same, and it still managed to crank out some coop mods, it just required a lot of work to re-write parts of the AI's code to attack multiple targets, and levels had to be modded and rebuilt to support multiple players ( like Half Life 1 and SvenCoop, AI was modded, and some levels had to be rebuilt). So yeah, I don't really care that Halo2Vista won't support online coop, but if they gave us the full support tools for us to make it, we could easily see a good 3rd party mod for coop.