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Comment by aaron-lebo | Hacker News Reader

It still blows my mind that Tribes came out in 1998.

That was a game with vehicles, easy modding (Tribes Football, RPG, Shifter, Renegades, anyone?), incredible mechanics (skiing), massive maps, recordable gameplay, a very active competitive community (OGL, 5150, players like Natural), And it was very playable on a 56k with some servers supporting 64+ players. Frankly, it puts a lot of titles with massive budgets, dev teams, and 18 years of learning to shame.

Thank you Dynamix.

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Skiing was a bug - friction didn't apply to players while the jump animation was playing, but gravity equations did, so players slid downhill a bit. During beta, players learned to hammer their spacebar to maintain this frictionless state, skiing incredibly fast. Eventually, a script was released to automate this, repeating the jump when spacebar was held down; other games might consider this a cheat, but the community embraced it, and so did the devs.

Xtremeski came later...

Skiing was a bug in Starsiege:Tribes - it was a feature in Tribes 2 and arguably made the whole series into what it is.

The community eagerly awaits a reboot that can even come close to challenging the technical & operational superiority of T1 & T2. What masterpieces they were.

https://www.playmidair.com/ is leading contender. lots of devs were t1/t2 comp players

Best i can tell, most of the dev team and budget is dedicated to the art side of the game. Meaning maps, models, sound etc.

And 18 years of learning? Sorry but most of the people and companies from back then are long gone. Best i can tell there are very few game development courses out there, and fewer still focus on the network plumbing.

The difference is substantial: There are books describing some standard practices now, third-party engines will at least include some basic networking functionality, and every worthwhile book on engines will at least mention what you need to do to reasonably support multiplayer. At the time that Tribes was developed, none of that reference material existed yet - you had to do your engineering from scratch, and there were plenty of major releases that shipped a multiplayer that was essentially broken or only viable on LAN - no Internet play, server browsers, or matchmaking.

Today it's more common for multiplayer to only be broken in a limited set of ways, instead of "we are hacking away at a fundamentally wrong architecture for this problem".

>Today it's more common for multiplayer to only be broken in a limited set of ways, instead of "we are hacking away at a fundamentally wrong architecture for this problem".

While true generally, that doesn't preclude us from some epic failures. My understanding is that The Division implemented client-authoritative simulation and is now in a hopeless battle against those that would modify their client for an advantage...

No, it seems relativity free of cheaters. Once they brought out the ban hammer (as well as perma bans), the amount of cheaters seems to have dropped quite a lot.

Half-Life had a major problem with this due to hit-scan weapons that insta-hit instead of using equations to make them travel through the environment. Tribes got around this with the laser sniper rifle by giving it an insanely fast velocity value, so it didn't insta-hit, but still hit basically during the same game tick.

Matchmaking was a major hurdle. The game launched with an IRC client so you could connect to their IRC server and find friends or servers. They had an announcement system to announce in channel what server someone joined.

IIRC, the Master Server was added in 1.04, alongside OpenGL support. Before then, it was Glide-only. Tribes was basically built for 3DFX cards.

Ah, ShifterV1 was the best mod ever. My friends and I used to say that Tribes 2 would be an easy ptoject: just grab the features from ShifterV1 and put on a fresh coat of graphics paint.

Too bad the real Tribes 2 turned out to be such a disappointment.

But in retrospect, even Tribes 2 wasn't that much of a disappointment. The hard-core types that frequented Tribalwar complained incessantly about it, and I grant you that the weeks following its release were bumpy, but there were a lot of people who enjoyed the game considerably.

Now Tribes:Vengeance and the free-to-play nonsense that is Tribes Ascend? Those have brought the franchise to a near-standstill.

Tribes Ascend wasn't that bad during its early beta stages, though. I think that was late 2011 / early 2012. It went downhill with the consecutive patches following the game's release in April 2012.

The devs made some utterly idiotic decisions regarding how they wanted the game to work and it ended up having a whole load of unintended negative effects.

If you're falling above 72km/hr and jetpack, they do nothing and you actually fall faster. Under 72 it decelerates as you'd expect. This is purely because they tried to impose variable physics based on your velocity, which in turn was a bandaid to address other issues.

They really shot themselves in the foot and only as of about 6 months ago - if that - has a small subgroup of the old devs been allowed to start unravelling the mess and make it more like Tribes 1. Before that, they basically ceased work on the game and abandoned it in favour of throwing all their devs at their next cash grab endeavour, Smite.

SMITE's actually a really good game though with a very fair and affordable payment system.

Criticize them for not allocating enough staff to maintain Tribes Ascend, sure, but it's unfair to call SMITE a cash-grab.

Fair; I called it such because I was bitter that they completely and unapologetically dropped T:A just as it was getting some momentum behind it simply to divert everyone onto SMITE. It felt like the next trend came along (MOBA) so they just completely abandoned T:A without a second thought.

You're joking, right? It took something like 3 months of near-constant patches before Tribes 2 would even run on my machine. It was the buggiest game I've ever bought, and I was shocked that they'd chosen to release it in that broken state.

By the time they'd patched it well-enough that it actually ran somewhat reliably, my friends and I had completely lost interest in it. Tribes 2 was a franchise-killer. I never even tried Tribes: Vengeance after that debacle.

(Tribes Ascend started out great, then became a textbook case of how pay-to-win makes good games terrible.)

Playing Tribes 2 was where I learned about Unhandled Exceptions and exception handling. (I wasn't coding regularly then.) The game regularly crashed with "UE"s several times an hour for the first few months. At one point, I downgraded to a TNT2 to get it to play.

Tribes: Ascend was also fine, even with the free-to-play parts, until they pushed the monetization just a little too far. I think I have something like 200 hours in it playing the basic classes with most of the essential unlocks, and it was a great game. And then they released way too much paid DLC and things got a bit too ridiculous for me.

Ascend now gives all unlocks for a fixed price. The game has received some support recently, mainly changes to make it more like classic Tribes games.

That's cool to hear! I'm glad they finally made the paid content system sane.

Though... for this guy in particular it came too late. At this point Tribes: Ascend will probably remain a game I at one point played every night.

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