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Taking Halo 2 to Xbox Live

Posted by Zonk on from the from-LAN-gaming-to-anonymous-jerks dept.

An anonymous reader writes "In this new interview, Bungie Studios engineering lead Chris Butcher explains how his team took Halo 2 multiplayer battles to Xbox Live, with minimal glitches. Turns out there are a lot of clever tricks involved." From the article: "It's actually the same network model we used in Marathon back in the day, although Marathon had some bugs in it. The thing with this networking model is if there's a bug in the computer code where two machines could provide the same inputs but get different outputs, there can be problems. There are lots of different ways that could happen."

3 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. Slightly more readable version... by Ford+Prefect · · Score: 3, Informative

    ... Here ;-)

    I still reckon the best game networking in the world is that in Quake and its successors, such as Half-Life and its sequel. Unlike Halo and Halo 2, where co-operative play online was apparently an insurmountable technical challenge, in Quake-based stuff even single-player games are inherently client-server anyway.

    From the article, it sounds like Halo 2 multiplayer has moved in that direction away from the all-clients-equal approach of Marathon and Doom, with a single server accepting or denying player-damaging events. Although each client apparently still has a full version of the game world at hand, unlike Quake-style games where a client is only sent relevant stuff - might this allow for some audacious, map-spanning ultra-vision hacks and so on?

    Still, that's how they do the recovery thing if the server gets unexpectedly removed from play...

    --
    Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
    1. Re:Slightly more readable version... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Read through it again.

      Halo's networking model was like Marathon's. Every client was sent every individual thing about the game world. This was awesome for a LAN, as games were extremely smooth. However, this is simply too much data to send over the internet reliably.

      Halo 2 however, like Quakeworld (Though not Quake), uses client-side prediction to determine where players are. This results in a massive bandwidth decrease. Also like Quakeworld, and most other FPS games, the server, not the client, confirms or denies the hit.

      The server is also only sending relevant information by assigning objects a priority, as he discussed. The closer you are to said object, the more frequent it will be updated.

      The way a new server is found if the host is lost, is that the Xbox with the smallest ping time is selected, and then the other Xboxes sync up data with the host, leaving you more or less where you were before the previous host left.

  2. Summary is incorrect by Have+Blue · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Marathon quote is referring to Halo 1. Halo 2 is nothing like this, as the article explains.