Intresting read.

[Blacksand]

This was a rather intresting article I read over at Stuffo, from one of Bungie's lead engineers. Some of you more techy people will probably really enjoy it.

It's basically talking about the challenges and complexities of Halo 2's networking from a technical standpoint. Don't worry, it's all in plain english and easy to understand.

http://stuffo.howstuffworks.com/halo-network.htm

[Outrageous Cheek]

I still find it hard to understand...Is there anything really really intresting? That someone who just loves the game would like??

[Blacksand]

Depends.
It does, however make one appreciate the immense amount of work that actually went into making the game .. and it does explain why sometimes things don't play out like you think they should. From my understanding of it, and I could be wrong, is basically in Halo 2 .. hmm, let me take a moment to gather my thoughts and try to put this as clearly as concisely as possible.

Right. When you're playing Halo 2 over Xbox Live, there's basically you - the client, whoever else is playing the game - also clients, and whoever is hosting the game - the server. When you perform an action, say .. throwing a grenade, or sniping at someone, your client(Xbox) is actually predicting what will happen to the other players and objects in the game. Your Xbox then sends this prediction to the server Xbox, which then verifies your prediction of events with the other client's predictions and makes a judgement. The server is the final authority, so to speak. So while your Xbox might be sending the server the prediction that you just headshot that swordwhore from across the map, the server might decide to agree with the other client's prediction that your shot barely missed to the side.

The rest of the article deals largely with dynamic server switching and priority issues for renders and packets, like say .. gunfire has high priority, while the pile of boxes that fell down behind you where you can't see it and don't really worry about it would therefore have a rather low priority.

What intrested me is the processing time that all this must take, and added with the natural latency of playing online, it's amazing to me that the entire experience comes off so smoothly with so many players.

[Outrageous Cheek]

I know exactly what you mean (about what you said in the last sentence).

The sniping is spot on! I was really quite amazed myself that it worked so well after seeing how inacurate it was in Halo 1 on PC.