RE: Zektor for the masses

G'day folks,

Actually, some work I saw back at Stanford might pertain to this idea of
phone lines and real time game play. As Zonn points out, the vector
environment is actually quite conducive to compressed information
exchange. Everything, the four players, death bagel, death bagel spawn
and up to five bullets, can be described as position and direction that
the object is pointing (except for player bullets which are too small to
have direction). Less than a dozen pieces of information to convey
every 40th of a second. Across a 28.8 modem, that'd give you
(28800/(40*8))=90 bytes of data to pack all dozen objects from a frame
of the gameplay. As to scoring information being updated, well, as I
said before who looks at score when playing Eliminator (besides we took
all the scoring information out so that we could add 4 more players and
serial modem functionality, right?)!

By the way, from a perception perspective once delays get beyond a
quarter second, then the players start complaining. Sorta like phone
echo.

Again, so there's a technical part of this email, would a Sega monitor
be able to handle all the extra vectors for 4 extra players?

                Steven S Ozdemir
                sso@dsc.com

>----------
>From: Zonn[SMTP:zonn@concentric.net]
>Sent: Thursday, May 22, 1997 4:15 PM
>To: vectorlist@goonsquad.spies.com
>Subject: Re: Zektor for the masses
>
>At 03:44 PM 5/22/97 -0500, you wrote:
>>You wrote:
>>> (Hmmmm. Now if someone wants to rewrite the code a bit and use the serial
>>> port on the multi-game to run a modem and have two-player Eliminator over
>>> the phone line...)
>>
>>You'd need at least a T3 line to make this work, and maybe even an OC3 link
>>(review the MORTAL KOMBAT 4 thread on rgvac for the reference ;-)
>
>I'll bet you wouldn't, that's the beauty of vector systems, you would only
>need to share of few position bytes.
>
>The complexity of the play field, and the number of options a player is
>allowed differ vastly between Eliminator and Mortak Kombat 4!
>
>Would do you need to know? Where everyone is, where everyone's bullets are,
>and where the Bagel of Death is. Someone should be able to encode this in
>very few bytes (Hey don't look at me! I work for a living, and they don't
>understand this arcade thing!)
>
>But if someone's going through that kind of trouble, wouldn't it be cooler
>to write it for a PC vector library instead of the G-08 system? Hey, I'd
>buy a copy!
>
>-Zonn
>
>
Received on Thu May 22 14:49:37 1997