peer-to-peer a Doom3 engine limitation?

[Tetzlaff]

Is the peer-to-peer setup for multiplayer a technical limitation of the Doom3 engine, or can it be expanded later for a more multiplayer-friendly client-server setup, let´s say for Quake4?

[Tetzlaff]

Somebody sure knows the answer, there are so many tech freaks arround here...

[EsH]

Hi. I'm way, way out of my field here, but since noone else answered, here goes.

The Doom3 engine has an involved physics system with it's bouncing boxes off of walls and demons falling chaotically over complicated geometry like stairs. In effect, you are sort of in the realm of that chaos theory idea that small initial differences conditions result in drastically variying outcomes. So it IS advantageous in a way to have the physics simulation running on one machine (so that timing variations between the different machines don't affect these small initial conditions). This was reasonable with Quake3 because all the physics and stuff was parametrically defined. You could run the physics on one machine, and it only took a small amount of data to broadcast (or whatever) the state to all the other networked machines. In Doom3, the physics might not be able to be updated parametrically because of how many more subtle variations cause drastic differences (for example, boxes don't just bounce, but they turn based on which corner hits what when, and so forth). There's so much more important state stuff to update each frame, and more network data. The more people you have, the more info has to be sent out, and this might be too much of a bandwidth strain to justify having a single server.

Just a hugely flimsy wild guess, until someone with realy technical expertise in this area shows up :)

[Tetzlaff]

That sounds interesting. Maybe there theoretically is an option for Q4 multiplayer to add a hit box concept back in, instead of the complicated per-poly hit detection.

[BNA!]

EsH said:

Just a hugely flimsy wild guess, until someone with realy technical expertise in this area shows up :)

What you said plus the state of each light and the synchronizing of the level scripts.

[Tetzlaff]

So that sounds as if the Doom3 engine isn´t really valuable for large scale multiplayer games in the style of Quake 3 Arena or UT.

[BNA!]

Tetzlaff said:

So that sounds as if the Doom3 engine isn´t really valuable for large scale multiplayer games in the style of Quake 3 Arena or UT.

It's a single player game, the multi player component is nothing but a basic bonus you recieve for free.

[dsm]

Tetzlaff said:

That sounds interesting. Maybe there theoretically is an option for Q4 multiplayer to add a hit box concept back in, instead of the complicated per-poly hit detection.

That doesn't seem to be likely, given the fact that Quake 4 will be primarily sp focused.
It'll seriously hurt Q4's single player if it doesn't have per-poly hit detection like Doom 3 will have.

Quake 4 is supposed to expand on the Doom 3 engine and with Raven working on it, I'm pretty sure that's what will happen.

[Tetzlaff]

dsm said:

That doesn't seem to be likely, given the fact that Quake 4 will be primarily sp focused.

It wasn´t officially stated in a long time that Q4 will be SP focused (more like: "right now we are working on the SP part of the game.."), so it´s quite likely it will have a serious MP part as well. After all the MP was always the strongest aspect of the Quake series. So I´m interested if it´s even possible to have server-client MP, or if it will be doomed from the start to p2p with Doom3 engine.

[Zoorado]

P2P rocks!

For the record, Battle.net is one of the most popular online gaming network in the world. Obviously several million gamers don't mind the idea of P2P MP...

[dsm]

Tetzlaff said:

It wasn´t officially stated in a long time that Q4 will be SP focused (more like: "right now we are working on the SP part of the game.."), so it´s quite likely it will have a serious MP part as well. After all the MP was always the strongest aspect of the Quake series. So I´m interested if it´s even possible to have server-client MP, or if it will be doomed from the start to p2p with Doom3 engine.

Hmm, I thought it was officially stated in the announcement. I've seen nothing so far to officially denounce that.

It is indeed possible that Quake 4 will have more focus on mp than Doom 3 had, but so far, I get the impression that the focus is primarily on sp, which makes perfect sense given the reason iD are using this engine to do a primarily sp focused game.

iD chose to make an sp game, because the engine was basically far better best suited for that than for mp - the Q3A engine was already a big waste on graphics coding imo since you don't stare at pretty graphics while deathmatching.

As for Quake "being all about the mp", my opinion on that statement is that it's only the fans that make it like that. For iD themselves, the Quakes were just a bunch of games, each with updated tech. They only called them Quake because that was the easiest (They originally wanted Quake 2 to be called something different, but couldn't for coyright reasons - read the FAQ found on Planetquake's Quake 2 section), so if Quake IV deviates from the other three by being more of an sp game, it'd be absolutely no surprise...
..to me at least.
You're right about the fact that the mp was the strongest part of the Quakes though, but that doesn't mean that iD themselves want to keep it like that just because the fans seem to want it.
They've got other fans than the hardcore Quakers and even within the Quake communtiy, there seems to be people who like sp as much as mp (the Quake community is a very differentiated lot, since the games are so vastly different from one another).