If you're curious to see a close up now, there is some pretty good anti-aliasing and texture filtering going on.

Quote from: djdduty on May 10, 2016, 11:48:16 PM

Pretty much every game handles networking differently depending on the genre and needs of the game, I'd go into more detail but it would end up being an entire book.

The basics is that action games are typically reaction based, if you and your enemy are shooting each other the server needs to send proper reactions fast enough for players not to notice any latency (which there is a bunch, no matter what). The server must send data much more often in order to give an FPS shooter game enjoyable game play.

Keeping in mind some MMOs also offer PvP play which latency will heavily impact as well and the fact that the mobs are generally server sided in the typical implementation.

When I talk about latency I'm not talking about ping; I call that lag. I'm talking about the inevitable overhead time a certain network architecture adds for one player to see the actions of another player. In our case imagine all players had good ping of less than a hundred, they would still have a few hundred MS before they see the results of another player. This inevitable overhead time is usually mitigated by higher state update rates, using extrapolation, or both. Extrapolation is normally a fickle mistress and is hard to get right.

Even in pvp for most MMOs latency overhead is easily hidden and does not matter. In the types of MMOs I'm talking about, the only way to damage another player or npc is by using a skill(even regular attacking is a skill with a tick interval), and all skills are target based or AOE based. It's not like you're shooting a projectile that needs precise timing to collide with the enemy player. RNG determines if your skill hit or not and your client just makes the "projectile" follow them and hit them or not depending on the result, even if they teleport from lag. MMOs can have a lot of lag since latency is hidden from the players much better and much more easily. You can tell WoW doesn't bother with extrapolation, as if you lag out or DC players will stop moving rather than continue running along the same path until the server corrects them(but the running animation still plays, so it extrapolates that much). This signifies they use interpolation instead, which means they add at least 50ms-100ms of latency overhead (I don't really know the estimate). So they don't even care about a few hundred ms overhead (both player's ping + overhead from network implementation) and indeed it isn't a problem for most players until they get more than 150ms ping to the server and their skills start taking a recognizable amount of time to register.

The reason you don't see very many FPS MMOs is because a M(assive)MO game is very hard to network as is. Using these slower update rates under a more robust low cost infrastructure gives them the ability to have such a massive player base since there isn't near as much processing happening per player. At that point UDP becomes somewhat unnecessary as well(Although I think they should still use it, but meh), and that's why you see games like WoW using TCP.

Anyway, this is getting pretty off topic! 

Google protobuf isn't very hard to implement but I do understand what you're saying,
From the research I've done there's two goals whether it be FPS or MMO.

1) Deliver the data as fast as possible.
2) Deliver as small of chunks of data as possible.

That being said the idea is to calculate only the values which may have changed since the last send before sending the next packet in order to make sure the size of the packet is as small as possible which is why I agree with you on the bit packing, I'm not sure how efficient protobuf is in terms of 'compression' of the data, I just figured it'd be a decent choice considering I'm already familiar with it.

And I'd have to argue that even MMOs tend to send a shit ton of data, sometimes even more then action fps games do.
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Yes, exactly, if you want to send very frequent small packets bit packing is your best bet, protocol buffers seem to be better for slightly larger less frequent packets, I don't know if it supports bit packing but I feel like it would just send byte values, which is a waste of bandwidth when you're sending things a lot. However, I know most MMO games don't bitpack at all due to the cpu overhead per client and that's why I said Protocol Buffers would be more suited toward an MMO type game, especially since they tend to send larger state updates less frequently.

What you're talking about is known as delta state updates, it's very common all the way back to the quake multiplayer source. It's the obvious choice for any action game to keep the packet sizes small, bandwidth usage must remain low especially on a p2p network setup. It's a bit of a challenge to make it work with the udp protocol though since if a delta state gets lost you have to send it again before processing the newer delta states to keep things in sync. With a game like turok using a client/server setup it's possible to send full entire states compressed with common compression methods and bit packing and still stay on very low bandwidth usage, avoiding the complexity overhead of delta states.

MMOs do send a lot more data, less frequently (normally only 20 times a second or even less). They also typically use the TCP protocol. In these types of games latency isn't as huge of a deal since most actions are target based and they do sometimes trust the client too much to hide it and avoid cpu costs on the server. It's okay though, they are very good at hiding this latency since it's not critical and they have a LOT of player and ai states to send around to all the clients, that's a lot of data.

With bitpacking on a udp protocol you could achieve a reliable delivery system of bitpacked full(not even delta) state updates for 16 players at 60 times a second and still remain under 256kbps per client easy(I'm way over estimating too), which is more than feasible for ANY modern or even most outdated network connections. If that somehow DID cause congestion you just crank it back to 30 times a second or so for that client until the way is clear again. If you plan on a p2p setup rather than hosted servers, things get MUCH more complicated since the upload bandwidth becomes EXTREMELY constrained and you have to fit client updates into WAY smaller packets than you otherwise would have to.

The average consumer internet connection might have high download speeds these days, but uploads are constrained a lot, typically you have less than 750kbps to work with on upload. This is bad because if you have to update 16 other players they each only get about 46kbps of data... that's terrible and you can't always expect even 750kbps since clients might have someone doing something else on their network using upload bandwidth, or have even worse upload speeds than that. The only solution here would be to lower the player count, I suspect Turok would only have 4 player multiplayer anyway, so probably not too much of a problem? Even if you wanted 16 players, it's easy in Turok's case to fit player states into 46kbps at 60 packets a second(800 bytes a packet, very easy).

My point here is that you probably want packets as small as possible, especially if it's going to be peer-to-peer games, protocol buffers might not bit pack or compress data, but if you do write your own bit packing and compressing(not as hard as it sounds) you can easily fit within the constraints.

I'll try to start communicating with you on skype to avoid clogging up this thread with technical jargon, honestly I don't think this project even requires as much thought into networking as I'm putting in to it.

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One of my next moves will be integrating Google Protocol buffers in order to handle the data exchanges...
With that I should be able to create deltas of the information per player and handle everything in much smaller packets reducing latency overall and increasing the ability to play even if it's in a 'ghetto' state of syncing at the moment

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Hey, sorry to just pop in unannounced! I have been amassing a lot of curiosity and knowledge toward multiplayer game networking, even going so far as to reverse engineering some client/server games to create my own servers for education. Unfortunately I DON'T have a lot of knowledge reverse-engineering binary files or generally trying to figure out what the game is doing. However, if I could get in contact with you to explain things to me about how the dll works and modifies the game's behavior, I could probably help / contribute to this project in some way, if you're open to that.

Personally I don't see how protocol buffers would give you much benefit, especially not for a first person action game like turok. Protocol buffers might be a little too much luggage for something like this, I feel like a well built udp protocol with standardized read/write serialization through bitpacking seems like it would serve you better, but I don't have much experience with protobuf and you're probably more experienced than I am in this area.

I made a pull request, https://github.com/mdecicco/T4Loader/pull/1

With that change you can use premake5 to generate project files that will build the library binary for inclusion into other projects. If you use premake in your own project you can even include this premake5 to automatically include the loader library.