Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k modem connections

Re:Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k mod... by nightowl_games on Thursday June 13, 2024 @01:03AM (#40666135)

Not primarily. There were weirder CPUs in the past. Today's CPUs have largely converged on floating point operations. Basically just sin/cos/tan differ now.

It's possible to write fully cross platform deterministic code today, but it's harder to do and uncommon in libraries.

Writing state synchronization and using client side prediction is generally easier. Determinism is only necessary if there are bandwidth constraints.

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Re:Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k mod... by eru on Thursday June 13, 2024 @02:00AM (#40666387)

Also it's easier to cheat when your local client has all the data.

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Re:Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k mod... by meheleventyone on Thursday June 13, 2024 @05:43AM (#40667655)

Not so much easier but enables a different class of cheats in games where players don't have perfect information, even with other schemes there is normally enough information leaked that similar cheats are possible. OTOH using a deterministic simulation prevents a whole class of other cheats.

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Re:Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k mod... by nightowl_games on Thursday June 13, 2024 @10:16AM (#40669954)

What class of cheats are prevented in deterministic simulation but possible with a dedicated server running a state synchronization netcode model? I don't think any...

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Re:Serious Sam handled massive amounts of enemies on 56k mod... by eru on Thursday June 13, 2024 @11:24AM (#40670814)

Well, unless you don't trust the server.

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