Zero Ping INF, good idea or spawn of satan?

[LordKhaine]

Wouldnt ZP INF be a really good idea?. I mean, almost all the weapons would benefit from the mod, so weapon balences will not be effected at all. What do ya think?

[Bad.Mojo]

as far as I know it wouldn't work. Since the inf weapons are (this is where the as far as I know part comes in) projectiles, and I make this assumption because there is ballistics in the game, and doing ballistics is alot easier with a projectile rather than actually coding a parabolic arc-almost-kinda-hitscan, and even then it wouldn't even be a hitscan, and since zp only works with hitscan, there's no way this could work. If the team adapted the network code of the client (say made an inf stand-alone console and client using the primary functions of the engine but acting as a universal datagram protocol client instead... hint hint hint) that might help to effectively reduce ping. So far an OC12 server running from my own city (That's Ottawa, btw, some guy was running a game on a government backbone =) has clocked in at 90 ms. I'm on a 1meg cable modem with a 10/100 ethernet set at 10-full-duplex. That is not very good. It should clock at about 20ms, which it would with UDP (as seen in the Quake engines - the absolute only thing they did right.)

Yak yak yak, I talk to much. Change the entire client structure, yiah its unfeasible, so what? =)

[LordKhaine]

[img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_frown.gif[/img]

[Bad.Mojo]

Actually, if you go to PlanetUnreal's main page, ignore their ASCII-based april fools joke, and poke around for some sort of archive, the zeroping guys actually posted the whole technology of how zeroping works, if you're interested. If you guy to zeroping.com, all you get is "its all about the ping, bitch... our servers are up" whereas it once had all this cool info and stuff.

[thornz]

yeah, and also if you go to the planetunreal you find a trillion things on why zero ping is a blessing for some and a hindrance for others.

Just by their description, I am NEVER using that POS.

[Bad.Mojo]

Its not actually as bad as they make it out to be.

The way it works is like this. If player A has a line of sight on player B, and fires (with a hitscan weapon only [those are the "instant hit" weapons, btw]) then when the signal to fire actually gets to the server, it counts as a hit. Basically it takes the server's ability to register a hit, and puts it in the hands of the client.

Alot of people think this is cheap because "you can just unplug your ethernet card or telephone line, fire, and plug it back in to shoot around corners", but this is not so. First of all, if you are killed before the shot is registered, you die, and the spawning cancels the shot. Second off, you need to has a clear LOS to the target you shot at the time the signal goes through, meaning if they duck behind a wall or something while you're lagging, you do not get the kill. All it really does is say "okay, you were actually fast enough to hit this guy, but your modem wasn't, so what I'll do is since he moved n paces this way, I'll turn you n degrees this way, so that your hit registers".

Its perfectly fair, and legit, and it makes perfect sense. Its just a way for hitscan weapons to hit as if they were fired normally, but if your lagging pretty bad because higher band-width players are taking up the server's juice, and you start dropping a bit, well... it makes it a little bit more fair. This way not only does the guy who shells out $35 bucks a month for cable get a decent score, but so do you, because you were always fast enough, its just that damn telephone line that wasn't.

I said that already though. But it is a really fair, decent way to play. Doesn't work with projectiles for obvious reasons, and it of course doesn't work if you break LOS. Anybody who tells you its unfair is full of ****, and they're only saying that because their mad amounts of money every month for broad-band access are no longer making them look as good as it used to. Server Nazis.

[Catalyst]

ZeroPing still has the possibility that it could be exploited, so we wouldn't use it, and besides most of our weapons use projectiles for the ballistics simulation [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

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Chris Robbers
Infiltration Programmer

[Bad.Mojo]

Its true that zp could be exploited, but so can UT. For example: I take the invisible skin, and change the whitish-marking to darker so I'm effectively invisible. I then brute-force my way into the server admin settings, and force everybody to download and cache the skin. Only a little bit of pretty easy hacking, and I'm effectively invisible. To top it off, if I got really creative, I could set myself to be incredible thin, utterly small, have total air control, and anti-grav physics and jump to height ratios, as well as full armour and 200 health.

Its alot more effective than just taking advantage of zp. Course you need to be alot more creative to do it, too... but hey. =)

[Mr. T]

I'm not going to play on any servers with Mojo. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[Bad.Mojo]

j00 f34r myy l33t h4xX0r sk1llz.... LOLOLoLOLOLOLLO!!@!@@!!11!!@1

Man, AOL K1DZ are the best.

[thornz]

it can be exploited on the player side, not just the server side, also.