| RussWakelin said: I'm not sure this is correct. My understanding is that nearly ALL 360 Live titles actually run the games peer-to-peer. Xbox Live servers simply set up the game, then pick one of the members of the game to be the host. Halo 2, Halo 3 beta, CnC3, Gears, R6V, Shadowrun, etc. all worked this way. You'll notice if you are in a match and the hosting player drops out, the entire match pauses while a new host is selected from the remaining players. |
OK, I looked further into this. That's why the Xbox seems to require you to forward UDP/TCP ports 88, 2074 and 3074 unless your router supports UPnP (which not all routers do). The PS3 also seems to use UPnP, and fall back on STUN(T).
Note that these are not general solutions - they may very well fail to work in a dorm, e.g., where you might not control any of the multiple tiers of routers. It'll probably work as long as at least one player in the group has an available public address. Otherwise, there's no option other than falling back to relay servers which greatly increases latencies.
Any way, in my book this really doesn't count as "just works", but I was wrong never the less. My bad.
Regarding your comments on FPSs, the truth is they really don't work that well in a way. But since you can't usually see bullets, it's easy enough to fool you into thinking they work. For the most part the server is authoritary, in that it's server clock that counts. And despite the fact that you're playing on a skewed clock it's manageable to make it work, by guesstimating the positions of players, projectiles, etc between updates. Since you can rarely see the one 100% acturate projectile (bullets) it's not a big deal. Grenades, rockets, all have a bigger window of effectiveness.
But I'm sure you've experienced inconsistencies such as headshoting a guy that doesn't die and all the sudden you're the one who's dead. Fighters like VF just make these inconsistencies all the more visible. To make them work one solution is actually slowing down the whole game according to lag, and you can see how that works on SF2 on Live. Or make fighters with bigger effectiveness time windows, like DOA.
