Jago, I think that what Scampie was getting at is that with a dedicated server system, people have to pay from their own pockets to keep those servers running, so therefore when people stop playing, servers shut down and the game dies.

Of course there are always a few people who pay for dedicated servers through love for the game, no matter how many people play, but typically this isn't enough to maintain an active and healthy community, though there are of course exceptions (hello Quake / Doom etc). 

popular P2P-based multiplayer games which have survived with a healthy community and are still going strong after 10 years

Starcraft.

The world has moved on from Quake... all it's dedicated servers are dead. Yeah there's a modding scene, but not much of a gaming scene... too we didn't have a P2P system: no making a multiplayer mod/map and hoping servers run it; you just need to entice players to play it. With a dedicated server solution, getting mods played is very chicken and the egg in that server operators won't run something that doesn't get players, and players can't play something without servers running it.

You must have missed the fuckton of games that offer free dedicated server as a separate download.

Dedicated server software is free... the cost of renting a proper server to run it on is not. As someone who personally rents a TF2 competitive server, and admins a source engine gaming community with 5 servers... I can tell you, it's far from free.

I'm not trolling, I agree that currently, straight up P2P in a FPS enviroment isn't going to work. But I believe if some work is done, cutting out the middle man of a dedicated server is certainly a future which would be healthy for FPS gaming.

But currently the only benefits of a dedicated server structure is in speed and security. But there are downsides too. The server is the weak link in the game experiance, if it dies or gets overloaded, everyone suffers. Plus, somewhere along the line, someone has to pay the cost of running these servers and once the servers are gone, the playing community stops existing.

On the other hand, a P2P structure doesn't rely on expensive servers, and could theorically scale well to larger numbers of players without increasing cost. There isn't a weak link of a single machine or connection every player relies on. The downsides are that each player's connection contributes to overall lag, and security is a major issue, since each client is relaying information and trusting other clients which could be comprimised.

I'd think someone could be smart enough to figure out something for networking security. And I'm sure there's also something smart that could be done about minimizing lag (although, the march of the future with increasing internet speeds may solve this anyway). This is why I believe if Carmack thinks on these issues, they could fix them; which would make P2P a clear winner over dedicated servers... but if they don't, the gameplay experiance will be terrible (if inexpensive to deploy)... and they'll rightfully find no one playing their game. 

Starcraft is sort of a special case though...

I call BS on "special case", since IMO, a large competitive gaming scene is what drives a long and healthy life of a good multiplayer game in the first place. And I find that in FPS games with dedicated servers, the cost of renting servers is one of the early barriers that prevent more people from getting into the scene.

...but, if you insist on a different game, while it's not 10 years (6)... DOTA. 

The world has moved on from Quake... all it's dedicated servers are dead.

I've heard same bad things about the situation in the US Quake community, but this is absolutely not the truth in Europe. Around the clock, I can find SOME server with players on it and ping under 100. The last time I did a server search it turned up 150+ servers. I wouldn't call that "dead".

Dedicated server software is free... the cost of renting a proper server to run it on is not. As someone who personally rents a TF2 competitive server, and admins a source engine gaming community with 5 servers... I can tell you, it's far from free.

As someone who works in IT, deals with hosting on a daily basis and has his own server hardware I am well aware it's not free. However, you can in fact get away with things on a very very low budget. If the ONLY server version available is dedicated (and there is no technical reason why a game can't offer the options of dedicated AND listen AND p2p game hosting) there isn't anything to prevent you from running the server package on the computer of one of the players. If you actually want to run the dedicated server on it's very own hardware, a 200$ computer will very easily host multiple game servers and it will serve you for years.

But I believe if some work is done, cutting out the middle man of a dedicated server is certainly a future which would be healthy for FPS gaming.

Ironically, in my view, the biggest problem with P2P/matchmaking is precisely the man in the middle. It's simply not in the publisher's best interest to keep their matchmaking systems running for more than ~2 years when they want to sell you their latest and greatest sequels. And when it comes to men in the middle, I will definately take the longtime fans of the game over a game publisher. You don't even have to look very hard to find games that have been pulled the plug on by the publisher and you can no longer play them because the publisher decided so and you, the player, can do fuckall about it. And some of these games aren't even 5 years old. 

I'll wait to see how it turns out (the multiplayer), but yeah I'm not very hopeful... To top it off they've limited it to 9v9 games, I guess cause most people wouldn't be able to handle any more without a dedicated server, so meh...
To me dedicated servers are really a strong point of PC gaming, for FPS anyways.

About Rage, who cares? Have they even mentioned anything about multiplayer yet? Doesn't seem like that would be the focus of the game...

The only old p2p games still around that I can think of are Diablo2 and Starcraft yeah, and that's probably just cause it's Blizzard and their mountains of cash. 

"I srsly doubt UE3 sdk is free. You know, the way that Quakeinjector is free."
UDK is extremely free. And it does just a touch more than QuakeInjector. :) 

But developers/publishers are unlikely to just suddenly pull the plug on their match making system for a game that is actually successful, that'd just be bad business practice.

And while I can see the point that currently dedicated servers is the fastest/most stable/most secure system scamp is right in that if p2p architecture becomes more common for PC gaming then developers are going to address the flaws in the system (for example, if someone has a slow connection they can send their updated position to one client with a faster connection that then updates the rest of the clients, neatly avoiding one player causing mass lag spikes for everyone). And as for not trusting the data sent from a client, we already need PunkBuster/VAC/etc to stop people sending the server modified movement/shooting commands, I fail to see how p2p would make much of a difference... 

Oh, and I was one of the people whose initial reaction to the MW2 announcement was a 15 minute rant

(also, I apologise for my abuse of the common comma in the previous post ;) 

To buy as many multiple copies of the games Jago is boycotting as I can afford. Same goes with L4D2.

xxx 

Can I have the spare copies? I'm bare skint ;p 

http://www.cgpad.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=8323&d=1257899068 About four hours.

What do you guys think? 

I'm tellin' ya guys, it needs more cowbell. 

Well I think it could be a little brighter. I understand that the dark feeling is probably the mood he was going for, but right now it looks like disconnected pieces floating near each other.

Also, the angle is visually interesting, but it's hard to get a sense of the area itself.

I think it's visually interesting, but probably poor concept art, which I'm not convinced it was meant to be. I would suggest a brighter setting with more detail and the suggestion of a dark area instead of just Doom3 style picture. 

disconnected, but for the style as opposed to the darkness - the window looks photo realistic whilst the furnace is more painterly. 

Looks radiant.., although I agree with the contrast if the window and the smudgy reaktor feel. 

. 

feedback forwarded. 

Wouldn't it make sense to go through the mapping help thread and organise everything into a nice shiny wiki? It would be quite some work, but i think it would help a lot structuring the information. I'm pretty lost everytime I look into that thread ;-) 

Sounds like the fifth level of hell to make that and keep it updated - usually a bit of patience and searching for keyword is all that's needed. 

Ctrl+F is your friend :P 

http://www.politicalcompass.org/test

My results:

http://www.politicalcompass.org/facebook/pcgraphpng.php?ec=-4.62&soc=-6.00 

Depends on the expectations. It would probably help if it just had all the posts sorted and with irrelevant crap cut out. The way I'm imagining basically is to go backwards through the complete thread and paste info to appropriate wiki pages.

But yeah, I'm not really caring enough for the q1 info to do it myself. 

I stand here: http://www.politicalcompass.org/facebook/pcgraphpng.php?ec=-4.75&soc=-0.46

I am just french, far away to be communist, so I guess the test is not that accurate :P

Did it work well for you ? 

http://www.politicalcompass.org/facebook/pcgraphpng.php?ec=-6.88&soc=-5.64

Shockingly I'm pretty far left... 

http://www.politicalcompass.org/printablegraph?ec=-5.25&soc=-4.36