Adral - I think you're way off.
Again, I'm talking SINGLE PLAYER ONLINE PLAY, just like Crawl!'s doing now. I'm talking about a method for information travel that will enable *these games exactly*, with nothing new in terms of context, to be played using less bandwidth, so the games will lag less, or if my guess is correct, much, much, much less.
The idea is based on the fact that RNGs aren't random, but are based on certain values. This is counted on with KeyMovies, and I'm hoping it can be counted on here, to give the same results on multiple tries and on multiple machines, being dependent only on the initial value contained in the RNG and on a sequence of keystrokes.
The way you described it it is very prone to cheating (any MMORPG designer will tell you that). Foremost, the player can intercept the sent data and see the level he currently visits xD.
The way I understand it, it is no more prone to cheating than is an offline game. Likely much less, as you can't effectively alter char stats and level design without interacting with the host, nor can you savescum. Yes, the player will be able to access the files which are on his computer at the time, and unless a solution will be found, that's a tradeoff. Possibly, both this method for information travel and the current one can be used, the current one being considered more trustworthy in terms of mortem believability. But for this one problem I'm quite certain a solution can be found.
However, I'm still mostly thinking on the lines of online single player games, so I'm not sure I understand where MMORPG desginers come in.
Anyway, these are the kinds of things that should be discussed and dealt with, so as long as something can be suggested to solve the problem, I'm not too worried.
Another possible problem with this info-travel method might be the player simply playing offline through multiple scenarios, on a copied version of his online game (i.e. using those files that he has to simulate play on that single dlvl), then picking a safe course of action once one has been tested for.
This can be solved by having a modified RNG value being sent over from the host as a response to player action. The modified value will, of course, be the one used on the hosts next duplicated action. That means sending one action guest-to-host followed by an RNG value sent host-to-guest, which is still much less information traveling than there is currently. To prevent the player from "precognating" his one next action, the new value is recieved right *after* the player's next action.
So, it should come out:
- Player action keyed;
- Host recieves keystroke; host modifies own RNG; host completes action; host sends RNG modification;
- Player corrects to modification; player completes action; player action keyed (i.e. back to square one)
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Topic: Idea: implementation of a KeyMovie variant for faster online Crawling (Read 16637 times)