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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the work John Carmack did when he was writing QuakeWorld, which in 1996 was quite playable on a 56k modem! He started off predicting 300ms of lag on the client side, but it was too glitchy when the correction came in. He landed on a more conservative strategy, and his writeup is a touchstone of Computer Science lore for me:

https://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/johnc-log.aug.htm

I wonder if you could design a game around this by drawing BOTH the predicted motion and a ghost image of the last known verified server position of players, and then deliberately introduce 500ms of latency. The gameplay would then be about tricking your opponents into thinking you were going somewhere you're not.

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This existed in Guild Wars PvP. The game had a similar motion prediction system (and I think most multiplayer RPG games do), and when teams landed on laggy servers they were often uniformly laggy for everyone in the match, and you were able to use that to confuse the enemy if you were a bit more experienced.

How much of this improved network code made it back into the original Quake engine, and therefore into Half-Life 1? To this day, I have yet to find a multiplayer engine for an ego shooter which feels as perfect as the one in HL 1. For lack of a better description, the Half-Life 1 (and mods) multiplayer game-play just felt (and still feels) crystal clear. This has to be one of the major reasons why Counter-Strike became so big.

From Wikipedia [0]:

The engine also reuses code from other games in the Quake series, including QuakeWorld, and Quake II, but this reuse is minimal in comparison to that of the original Quake.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoldSrc#Development

> I wonder if you could design a game around this by drawing BOTH the predicted motion and a ghost image of the last known verified server position of players, and then deliberately introduce 500ms of latency. The gameplay would then be about tricking your opponents into thinking you were going somewhere you're not.

This would be fun. Maybe call it "Kalman's Revenge" or something.

Thanks for linking this - had never seen it before. Fascinating to look back into the annals of gaming/software history to see the birth of ideas that we now take for granted.

Also interesting, on an unrelated note:

> Romero is now gone from id. > There will be no more grandiose statements about our future projects.

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