Timothy Lochner

It's been more than 4 years since I worked on @vanguardsoh, but I think about that game a lot. Was my first professional gig, and a lot of things were new to me. As a junior engineer, many things seemed stupid and to be honest, many things were. 1/?

But the more experience I get the more I realize how brilliant the codebase was, especially the server code. This may be surprising to fans of the game. Vanguard was notorious for spaghetti code, but I think that's because it was ahead of it's time. 2/?

Quite frankly, I don't think I'm at liberty to divulge details, but generally, Vanguard was in concept, a multi-threaded server, where each zone (chunk) was a thread. There was lots of message passing, even if you weren't actually crossing server lines. 3/?

Which seemed stupid. If the entity you're attacking is in your zone (99.9% of the time that was the case), just handle the attack message immediately. Today, in multi-threaded games, message passing from one sub-system to another is foundational. 4/?

Lots of Vanguard was kinda "one level too low" in terms of abstraction. Serializing messages was a chore and error prone. It got better over the years, but that was well after launch. And this is only discussing the server code of the game. Nevermind other issues. 5/?

I take a lot of lessons from that codebase with me in my career. Many things multithreaded concepts were easier to understand because of my experience with it, despite being only running on basically 1 thread. 6/?

Vanguard gets a lot of crap, especially for it's spaghetti code. But really, I think the original authors of the (server) codebase saw a future few other engineers could, including myself until recently. It was ambitious and in ventured into untreaded waters.