RE: New Vector Games

G'day Clay and folks,

Well, that's why I had 8 person Space Wars as the fall back position for 8
person Space Duel. 8 object certainly covers two players. At 19.2 you
easily have 4 player. I'm sure that with some trickery that could become 4
pairs of players given the ship-linking capability of Space Duel. Now you
are up to 8 person Space Wars, I'd say.

People might interested a paper came out of Stanford in the late 80's about
how 1/4 second delay across cabinets would not affect game play. Their
point was that 60 frames a second of update was not necessary. Events in
games are "bursty" so if you can spread the information about the events
across 1/4 second then you get more throughput. In their case, they
demonstrated this on a multi player "shooting" pacman game....a much easier
case than our free form Space Wars example.

I'm not suggesting this approach, since the Stanford suggestion complicates
the project by an order of magnitude. But it does seem to be the way that
Clay's going by transmitting control information.

                Steve Ozdemir
                sso@plpt.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Clay Cowgill [SMTP:ClayC@diamondmm.com]
> Sent: Thursday, December 17, 1998 4:22 PM
> To: 'vectorlist@mcfeeley.cc.utexas.edu'
> Subject: RE: New Vector Games
>
> > IF you can link 2 cabs together, I'd like to see some flavor of
> > X-pilot
> > run on there.
> >
> X-pilot good. X-tank better! ;-)
>
> > BTW, forget any shared memory scheme, go serial.
> >
> I was going to say the same thing, but without CAN. A lowly 9600bps
> serial link can shove about 16 bytes per frame at 60Hz, or just update
> data at 30Hz (still plenty fast) for 32 bytes per update. If you want
> one machine to be "server" and shove the position data for all shapes
> every frame that still gives you 8 objects (2-byte position info)
> without doing anything sneaky.
>
> You can always just transmit the control status (buttons) and let each
> game run calculations locally too. Lower bandwidth. Probably easier to
> write too. (Serial routine data gets parsed and plugged into the button
> status variables.) A couple stored AT commands let you do modem play
> easily with plain serial too... ;-)
>
> > Oh, allow team play by using the linked ships from Space Duel in a
> > networked game - in the scrolling caverns of course :-) And what ever
> > you
> > do don't put in anything that resembles a "plus sign" that can kill
> > you.
> >
> Hmmm. I'm sure Mike Balfour or someone could add serial support to MAME
> so you could go multi-player against PC-owners too. ;-)
>
> -Clay
>
Received on Thu Dec 17 19:04:17 1998