Battlefield 1942. Let's not debate the quality of the game (which I hear is very good). The one thing that interests me about this game is that for its 64 multi-player mode, broadband appears to really be the only option. What do you think, will more and more online games ignore dial-up, and focus on broadband only, thus increasing the possibilities of the game, but limiting its userbase? [edited by - Silvermyst on October 23, 2002 2:45:39 PM]

its just that dialup sucks so bad, so laggy that realtime apps simply cannot be done good enough even to satisfy dialup users. Not really even one game I can think of was good on dialup except worms but that was turn based. The problem grows exponentially when you realize that dialup simply cannot handle real time anything. And broadband is dropping in price. If you ever actually tried writing a real time game, youd be suprised that ANY internet gaming was possible, it really is a miracle of clever programming. However, one hope remains for internet gaming, clever programming and increased local CPU power, the tradeoff being that to a point, more usage of CPU can bullshit the details that the connection cannot send. Thats how compressed stuff works, it can go around the internet in a small size and costs alot to unpack. However even then, you cant pack a movie into a 1k file. So is the same way with computer games, and the practical lower limit for fun gaming is unfortunately still higher than dialup play allows.

Broadband-only, dial-up is a thing of the past.
My 1Mbit is cheaper than a normal phone-line and everyone has already got mobile-phone.

I played the b1942 Demo with 56k and I had a good amount of lag but when you find good servers it runs just fine.

Well, I don''t think 56ks are that bad, I play Diablo all the time on a 56k, and it has no noticable lag, although I must admit, I wouldn''t dare even play a game like b1942 without my trusty ADSL line

When it comes down to it really, ANY game can be run at decent speed with a 56k, it just takes good coding to decrease packet sizes... Unreal Tournament also runs fine on my 56k!

I think most companies are going broadband only now, specially european developers. However I think games with light network load will still be developed with dialup in mind... BF1942 was developed by Dice, scandinavian developer and scandinavia is one of the most broadband developed regions...

::aggression is the result of fear::

Hopefully if XBox Live catches on, more gamers will be forced to go broadband. I''m so glad Microsoft went with broadband only.

Dial up is hardly a thing of the past, the vast majority of people still have dial up, and this will not change anytime soon. Why? Because most people only use the internet to check email so they couldn''t care less about paying for broadband. Of course those are not the kind of people interested in online games anyway so don''t worry about them. However, many people still live in areas where broadband is not available (you can use satellite but it has to much latency for online games). So until more areas are broadband enabled, I think it is a mistake to neglect the 56kers, who are still the majority of gamers.

Battlefield 1942 can handle 64 players because it dosen''t support a good weapons''s bullets destination algorythm (??). So some bandwidth is saved and they decided to increase the number of players. What I mean is, play counter-strike, or any other common FPS and then play Battlefield 1942, you''ll see the difference. In Battlefield it is like impossible to kill someone if you compare battlefield to others FPS. Correct me if i''m wrong.

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"Oasis is not dead !" - WiseMan

I know how that is, I figured it was just me and my lag though.