In Age of Empires DE (a peer to peer RTS), players yank their net connections (sometimes just for ~1 sec or so) when they're losing. I've seen this happen repeatedly. It makes writing net code for titles like this even more difficult.
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The net layer in Clockwork Empires did two smart things: it could be configured to stall/drop packets at random so we could experience this during development, and it had compression that we disabled during development so we couldn’t rely on the extra bandwidth.
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(And then we cut multiplayer for time and budget constraints anyhow, lol.)
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On Linux there's also netem that allows simulating packet loss and delay etc: https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/networking/netem … (when developing a windows game you still could put a Linux-based bridge between two local computers - and maybe you could even set it all up on one machine with VMs)
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I mean, adding it to the app itself was just “if (random()) return;” :)
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Yea I had something like this in DE too. It was absolutely necessary. One time a new dev broke the test code for the low-level net code, using the excuse that we're shipping in 1 week so who cares. Well, we of course didn't ship in 1 week.
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Haha, tale as old as time!
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This "new dev" was put in charge of the next title. I bowed out once we shipped.
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Funnily enough I was watching a video just the other day where they were talking about using a program (Netlimiter AFAIR) to cheat in games by introducing just enough lag that it wouldn't d/c when they hit a hotkey.
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In Age DE all this does is slow the game down or pause it for everyone. It's a purely lockstep model. It just makes the game slower/more annoying for everyone.
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Yeah, they were talking about more FPS style games. Particularly older ones that were more trusting of the client.
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When playing on a Laptop over Wifi, they might have an actual HW switch do (de)activate it
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