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/?