Why Project Flare Might Just End the Console War

An anonymous reader writes "Project Flare, the new server side gaming technology from Square Enix, turned heads when it was announced last week. The first tech demos do little more than show the vast number of calculations it can handle with hundreds of boxes tumbling down in Deus Ex, but the potential is there to do much more than just picture-in-picture feeds in MMOs. As a new article points out, what's most interesting is the potential to use the technology for games that use more than one system — OnLive may have used this tech before, but only to play games you can buy on discs in the shops anyway, but the future is in games that need the equivalent of dozens of PS4s or Xbox Ones to power them. Ubisoft has already partnered with Square on the project."

Comments

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[SuricouRaven]

Write a mod for ut2k4 and you'll soon start seeing how it works. The local game runs a simulation, but subject to correction by the server. Extrapolating events until the packets catch up. Really latency-sensitive things like sniping are handled locally. This can lead to some very strange things happening at times:

1. Run past a window.
2. Clear the window.
3. Your movement is passed to the server, and then to another player.
4. Other player snipes you.
5. Snipe victory is reported back to the server, then to you.
6. Half a second after passing the window, you drop dead. Headshot. Even though from your perspective, you were in a place you should have been out of sight. Serves you right for running past a sniper-visible window.

Generally the game is good enough that almost all of this is transparent though. Only the exceptionally observent notice it. Still rather strange to code for, as everything you write is actually being executed three times in parallel (On the server, on the client, and on everyone else's client), and you need to make sure that all three executions eventually give the same result, even if not at quite the same moment.

Re:IMO, it is not going to work

[rsilvergun]

Don't forget the ISPs have more or less killed net neutrality and will soon be charging $$$ for bandwidth on the lines run with your tax dollars.