Backed this right after the kick-starter opened yesterday, but I am a little worried after reading a few interviews that the ability to reconnect to a game (after a minor internet outage, crash, whatever) might be overlooked. Nothing would ruin a game like this for me more than spending 3 hours playing only to crash and be unable to rejoin (this was a major reason why I stopped playing SupCom after being so excited about it for so long... I was just so hard to get a good large game where no one got dropped part way through, ruining it or everyone else).
No worries, reconnecting will work fine. SupCom was synchronous which made reconnecting hard. This uses client/server which makes it easy.
Agreed. And actually, "savegames" are potentially also a lot simpler, because you only need to store the server side state. That's almost trivial with, say, an EC2 instance. You just halt it. :geek: Actually, if there's going to be a dedicated server build, I might make an Amazon Machine Image for it so people could run their own servers using Amazon's free tier (assuming that's beefy enough for reasonable games, e.g. 4v4) with a few clicks. Yes, but you will trade it for latency (this may or may not be better than the latency you got in supcom, which was time slices of about ~500 ms). But it's going to be YOUR latency, and YOU can fix it by improving YOUR computer and connection. And everyone ELSE will be responsible for THEIRS. Also, if you play on a server you trust, a lot of cheats become impossible. For example map hacks - the server simply never sends any unit intel to your client that you're not supposed to see. In a synchronous game, every client knows everything (remember all the scoreboard cheats in supcom? you'd know exactly how many units of which type the enemy had, etc.) The dedicated server can also perform a lot more sanity checks; where a script bug in the client was present on all other clients as well in the synchronous games, the server code could be snappier, cleaner, and more robust. It could also be patched independently (to trap exploiters, etc.).
