A few things to note:

1. CS and Halflife (which is the engine cs runs on since it is just a mod) does employ culling of players and objects from updating if they are in a different "zone" (ie pvs). Anyone who has done any modding would know this. halflife is not the smoothest nor most accurate. In fact plenty of articles and papers have been written about the networking in halflife. more on this in a minute.

2. Quake2 is quite a fast twitch game (especially if you call CS a twitch game). There were levels that supported 64 players. This was playable back on the hardware meant for quake2, not todays hardware. It ran pretty good too, assuming you had a decent ram for the server.


Now on to the networking. HL and Quake both have two very different ideas of network play. Quake was designed for low latency players to have the advantage while HL became a haven for the high latency players. You see as a low ping player in halflife you would see an incorrect world. Effectivly the server gave benefit of the doubt to the high ping players by using the extrapolated positions they saw for hit detection, which is not what the low ping players saw. Quake on the other hand was more server authoritative and based hit detection by server interpolation. This means in quake you would have to lead your oppoenet a bit if you had a bad connection (but not too much since the client extrapolation was not that bad).

On the other hand, low ping players had to worry about compensating their aiming instead of the high ping players. This gives a much smoother game to all players visually. however high ping players playing against low ping players gain a slight advantage. players at one point took advantage of this by artificially dropping packets or delaying packets (dnt remember which method was used exactly) to increase their accuracy. Sounds stupid, but it was done. Also in CS the game used inaccurate guns (ie there is a cone where the bullet will go which can become larger when moving or when shooting for too long) which helps mask problems of lag. Players can miss because of lag, because the server choose a number that cause the bullet to miss, or a combination of the two. The player would never know. In fact, the worst scenario for lag compensation is a moving player. You can easily fix this by making sure player wont move because his guns would be too inaccurate to hit a barn point blank. You can even get the best case scenario of both players standing still if the players want to shoot at each other (instead of one runngin and the other shooting). With only one player or possibly no players to compensate for in hit detection, things become much easier. I dont think counter-strike is a good example of a twitch fps because its guns are inaccurate thus player skill is not fully represented. This is not to say the game sucks, since it was a good game until it got steamed and full of cheats.

Now that is out of the way.

500 players in an intense twitch shooter is begging for broadband. i dont know why anyone would want to code this for a modem user beyond more accessiblity. Face it, if you want complex gameplay you need the bandwidth. The lower the average player ping, the easier it is to keep things smooth without giving an advantage to certain players. Plus many newer MMO games are requiring broadband or reccomending it (and this are non twitch games).

you can also take a look at face of mankind (http://www.fomportal.com) which is currently in open beta. The game itself is actually not too good, but it has high hopes. Its a MMO fps that wants to allow battles fought by skill not stats. Also necron (which is a bit older) did this. They are more like MMORPGs that played like FPSs instead of large scale war games like planetside. However FOM does show promise.

You also have to realize that planetside was not meant to be a single player going toe to toe with tons of people. Its a team based game in which overal strategy is key. Whats the point of having 500 players if not for the team play? You say you can kill 5 people in a few seconds in most twitch based shooters, i hope you dont mean counter-strike. Quake is a better judge of twitch skill because guns are accurate, and dont miss because of some random number generator.

You will need to compromise in gameplay. you will have to decide what style of play you want, and how badly you want it to be twitched based. There are more skills then simple aiming and dodging, you know.

Also forgot to mention, is it possible that the "skilless" players you fought actually had skill? Is it possible that other players on his team shot you also while fighting him? Is it possible that you are really not as good as you thought (counterstrike can do that to people since it does not require as much skill as they are lead to believe)? I mean killing 5 people in mere seconds would be a feat in CS since that would be the entire team (which makes me wonder what yoru team was doing). If it was Quake, then i can only assume that they were occupied with others or injured, plus rockets got a radius thus can hurt mulitple people. You are exggerating because you are unstatisfied with planetside. Some of it seems to be that you are just not as good as you think, or player son planetside are better then you think. Just because you cant kill 5 people in mere seconds does not mean skill is not involved. Sounds to me that you dont know teamwork.

[Edited by - qazlop on March 1, 2005 3:53:28 AM]

lol, sounds to me like you have an axe to grind. my point wasn't to boast it was to illustrate a point, which a couple of the people that posted in here apparently "got". who cares if im good at twitch games or suck horribly. think whatever you want. my point is that planetside was the closest game ive played to what i was asking about. several hundred people in the same instance, obstensibly using player skill versus a random number generator. i enjoy planetside, but it is not a "perfect" example of what i was discussing.

there are mechanics built into the game that reduces the importance of player skill, and supplants them with a paper/rock/scissors method. In addition, the client side hit detection cause the "feel" of the game to be unlike the "feel" of the premier twitch games.(CS, SOF2, etc...)

On that subject, it appears we have a concensus. A game of that scale COULD be implemented without gaming the fundamental design to compensate. I wasn't sure. Of course im still not entirely certain, but i know a bit about two of the posters here and respect their judgement. that they both seem to agree reassures me i might be receiving good information.