That was such a game changer for online play. Before that, to play Warcraft II my friend and I had to coordinate to set up a game, then call their model directly, and hope our parents didn't pick up the phone thinking it was a regular call.
After Kali, we could just sign on and join games. We also got to play as a team, which was so much fun. Friends2v2 was the map and game type we played SO MUCH. We had various strategies that we got really good at (mostly grunt rushing and offensive towering). I miss those games.
I believe DOOM and Warcraft 2 simply did lockstep determinism across all clients. You could run the simulations forward completely deterministically due to use of its and fixed point math.
Back in the day, your gaming could be super wrecked if someone with a 300ms latency joined :D.
Asking as I'm the host of netstack.fm, a podcast about networking and rust, but some episodes are just about networking alone.
Would love to devote an episode to the Kali TCP/IP IPX bridge as there's a lot to unpack there and that can be learned from. Any tips for a guest for such an episode are more than welcome!
Sadly I didn’t make a backup of my paper (not sure how I managed to screw that up), so I no longer have it.
Both companies were owned by the same conglomorate (at the time?), and cooperation was limited.
Ran inside IE using ActiveX or something. Was pretty neat.
I know the game was horribly unbalanced against humans once bloodlust showed up, but I still quit after they "patched" bloodlust years later in Battle.net. Felt sacrilege, like patching the queen in chess. Yeah, the queen is imba, but that's chess. Beating an orc player as a human was a fun flex.