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DOOM 3 will use P2P System?
Ant writes "From Page 6 of FiringSquad's QuakeCon 2002 Postmortem article: John Carmack said something at the end of the Q&A about how the multiplayer will be only four players?
Tim: After 2 hours of talking up at the podium, sometimes you leave a few details out. Doom 3 multiplayer will be fully scalable. It will be a peer to peer system. We haven't started working on it yet. Tell everyone not to panic - it will be fine. John just forgot to mention it'll be scalable past four players. It's hard to give a hard number because we haven't started working on it yet. Right now we're focused on making Doom 3 a kickass, over the top single player game."
Not to bash eye candy, but doesn't anyone have a better idea for gaming than FP shooters?
What could Wil Wright or Al Lowe or Sid Meier do with a badass graphics engine behind them?
We already know what Carmack can do.
I have been pwned because my
P2P is a fad and I predict that sometime after the beta they'll have things set up in a more traditional client/server fashion... though they likely won't call it that.
But what I found much more interesting was this quote:
"Absolutely, but Linux version basically means an NVIDIA version - that's the only safe bet for working video under Linux in Doom 3."
Gah!!! I hope ATI and Matrox see that and consider it a challenge. It's really discouraging that the only quasi-respected video drivers for Linux are proprietary.
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I'm very interested to see how they will tackle the security part. In general, you cannot trust the client. Ever. Introducing a P2P network will enable one hacked client to wreak havoc on other clients. Some redundancy might be introduced to prevent cheating, but that would increase bandwidth, neh?
Are FPS's perhaps already trusting the client anyway? Is a cheat-proof multiplayer FPS a myth?
OK.
Someone asks about the multiplayer Doom 3. They haven't worked on it yet. In the middle of a live Q&A session, Tim is assuring everyone the game will be multiplayer. He starts throwing out words even though he doesn't know the exact way it will work, because, hey, they haven't done multiplayer yet.
Tim blurts "It will be a peer to peer system." That's the entire discussion of that in the whole article. There is nothing else.
By "peer to peer" system he simply meant "yes, you will be able to hook up your computers and play together" and nothing else. Why does this deserve a front page article? It doesn't. It was obviously something he said while in a live situation and he wasn't sure of the details.
The poster of this article looks sillier than the stock market and Alan Greenspan. What's even more disturbing is that Taco fell for it too. Someone needs to send over good strong pot of coffee.
It's days like these when the trolls start to make sense.
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This is what I've always loved about Descent! For those of you who're not familiar with it, Descent was P2P, not requiring any one machine to be a server. Somehow the load was shared amongst all the clients. It was never a problem if one machine in particular crashed or disconnected - the game continued between the rest.
Granted, I think it was made to work on a LAN only, but if ID could pull this sort of feat off with Doom 3, I'd be all for it!
I'm guessing that this would eliminate the need for one person to have tons of bandwidth and a good machine dedicated to be a server. This should allow virtually *anybody* to start a game (even those on dialup, maybe?)
As someone who's cable is limited to 128k up, I'm very excited about this development!
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Last time I checked, that was a singleplayer game that they threw a few LAN maps into at the last minute.... the rest is history.
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Look at Battlenet. It has a lot of the characterics of a peer to peer system. If you host a Starcraft game where only one person has the map, first it downloads from that one person to one more person, then from those two people to two more people, then from those four people to the other four people (if it's an 8-player game)--in other words, from peer to peer. And there is no one specific set host--Battlenet itself assigns the host based on who has the best bandwidth and processor power...and if that person gets dropped, someone else's machine takes over.
Peer to peer doesn't automatically equate to Napster. It just means people send stuff to each other instead of to and from one master server. Geez, Slashdot stories are like playing buzzword bingo these days.
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