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: 3D and the future of the past. :
: 12/02/2008 :
- Why did I create www.ZFATE.com? Take a moment to look at the future of 3D games, by looking at the past. I would have to say the 3D programs have been an interest of mine, since I first saw a video called, "Money for Nothing", followed by, "The Mind's Eye". This started back when I was still programming, as a kid, on an old Commodore VIC-20. Since 3D wasn't a possibility on the Commodore, that I knew of, my interest in that old computer died not long after that video was seen. Eventually, I came across a Commodore Amiga-500, which had the potential for 3D, but that was out of my grasp. My focus in 3D was still left to my imagination and my drawings.
- It was around this time, when I became familiar with the internet, before it was the internet. There was an old hacker chat program, which you could connect to private chat servers and BBS's. A whole 2400bps, not 24Kbps, connection rate. I did find an online MUD at the time, but it required telnet commands that I didn't understand. (Remember I was a kid still, with no access to programming code, other than the few old books that could be found in my school library. The collection was shrinking every year.)
- At some point in time IBM computers went from 16 colors to 256 colors, and I stumbled across one that had a demo of "Wolfenstein 3D" running on it. Though it was not the first true 3D game, it kept my interest in the future of 3D. My interest in these new computers made it seem as if I was living at "Radio Shack". I can even remember the day they had rolled-in the latest set of computers which had more than 256 colors. These new computers were into the $1000.00 range, and way beyond the budget of kid who is only eleven. They were still nothing, compared to my old Amiga-500, except they had a hard drive, and a lot of RAM, nearly 16MB!
- When I turned 17, "Doom" was created, which led to me getting a decent computer by the time I was about 20 years old. Until that time, I was still playing with my old Amiga-500, and using my friends computers. Over the years, I played, edited, modified, networked, and hosted, games such as "Doom", "DukeNukem 3D", "Unreal Tournament I and II", "Quake I and II and III", "Need For Speed III", and many others. This ultimately stopped as my internet connection could not keep-up with me. I was also becoming a problem to keep-up with my internet bills. (Not at the prices that AOL was charging for such limited access.)
- I took some time-off from online stuff, worked on more 3D design and programming, nothing major, except some of the stuff I did for "Hallmark Cards Distribution Center". This gave me the start-up funds that I needed for a networking game-room. That was fun, but due to an inability to expand to desired size, I closed the shop after a year of operation. I had originally designed the business model to be neutral, and had not realized that neutral equals no expansion. (I think I kept looking at the income, but over-looked my actual bills at the time. Had I not had rent, car-payments, and various other personal bills that were higher than they should have been... This would have been a nice 500% ROI. However, I did end-up with several computers, and a cool set of "Wild Eyes" contact lenses!)
- At this point, I decided just to get myself one nice computer, in advent of the new "High speed internet" that was proposed for arrival within the next year. I ended up with a mini-super-computer, that damn near made me broke, and eventually got online again. My only disappointment with high-speed, at the time, was that the other side of the net was not high-speed. It would be a few years until websites themselves realized that they could send faster than 56K downstream to a client. I suffered horrible lag playing any online game, that I wasn't hosting myself, or that wasn't hosted by another friend with a high-speed connection.
- Internet lag, waste of bandwidth due to collision, poor programming, poor packet control, and maxed-out servers and games on these horrible designs made playing anything unbearable. Making the problem worse, was all the morons that just kept doubling the computers needed to keep spewing this crap into the internet. Sniffing packets shows just how horrible some of this data is. Tons of duplicate and redundant data sent, due to idiots trying to use TCP as a full gaming connection for clients. Not to mention all the UDP connections they opened, attempting to puke out as much info as possible, in hopes that something makes it to the other side. No wonder my ISP didn't like me!
- These issues led me to researching the code they actually used for communication. Most were smart, and didn't use "Windows Sockets", however, the sockets they wrote were all blind hacks. Obviously they had no idea how a network works over the internet, and no idea how to actually communicate with the network cards. Tons of redundant and useless calls, in addition to leaving dead-code in place, which had no actual function, other than slowing down the communication. However, there was little I could personally do, since I could not recompile and redistribute a fix, and most of the software had been abandoned by the time it was released. (Sold "As Is" to the highest bidder, who had no idea how to fix the problems, and didn't care as long as it made them a few dollars in the sale.)
- Well, that time has come and gone. Things are getting better, but they are falling back to the old-ways. The communications are fine, but the data being sent is as redundant and useless as ever. There is one universal truth to online games. "The user data can not be trusted." This is what fuels most of this redundant and useless communication that we see degrading our online games and generla internet bandwidth now. That is my focus, that is my drive, this is easy to fix. (Not that it is easy to undo, but it is easy to fix.)
- All my years of formal and informal research have led me to today. It is my personal objective to see that all the "Next Generation" games have something similar to this. It is time they stopped thinking backwards and stopped making hacks to fix hacks. This is why I created www.ZFATE.com. It is not "The solution", it is an attempt to offer, "A solution", which is not a hack to fix a hack.
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MSIE: WTF, where are my pages going? I hear the damn click-sound, so where is my page? Damn-it, load the page, load it, load it...