Sonic's White Glove Diaries -

Updated and maintained by Johnny 'Sonikku' Wallbank and A.J. Freda

Monday 6th September 1999

Netplay

Huzzah, it's me, Sonikku updating this time, on Netplay! Firstly... why did we call this 'Sonic's White Glove Diaries'? We thought of making it similar to Sonic X-Treme's 'Red Shoe Diaries'... with one major difference, SRB2's going to be completed!

So, onto the main topic - Netplay. Firstly - How the heck can you play a Sonic game over the Internet? Firstly, there's the co-op mode, which is the Single Player mode, but fighting with up to four friends, or alternatively, you can play the Survival mode with up to four players, where you have to try and out-survive wave after wave of badnik attacks, OR you can play the Race mode with up to four players, which is similar to Sonic R, where you have to run around a course to the finish... OR you can play Capture the Flag mode for up to a massive thirty-two players! Here you have to try and capture the other teams' flag and hurry back to your base!

Bashing bots in the co-op mode!

Wait - Why only have 4 players in the other modes? With co-op mode, it'd be just plain stupid having 32 players running around the level, with one person hitting all the badniks, and the rest all crowded behind said person. Repeat process until bored... it wouldn't work. The survival mode might be possible, but right now, it's still at 4 players... Race mode? Imagine a 100 meter race with 32 racers all crowding around the starting block... or Sonic R with 32 players crowded around the start block... that wouldn't really work, although 8 players might be a possibility worth considering.

Next - how well does it run? Will Sonic be playing at a fairly smooth speed without any lag, or will it be like playing in superglue? For anyone who's not played a Net game, 'lag' is the time it takes for your player to move, for an example, if you had a ping time of 120ms, it'd take 120 milliseconds for you to move (.12 seconds), on the other hand, if you have a ping of 870, it'd take 870 milliseconds to move (.87 seconds). Considering that I live in England, (where the net services aren't exactly great) and A.J. Freda lives on the other side of the world in America, the lag isn't too bad. Certainly better than a game of Quake II in a UK server for about 6-8 players. Although whoever's being the server (usually A.J.) almost always wins the game. A new version of the engine we're using will be coming out soon that will fix a lot of the delays and netplay problems by using a technique called "Client Prediction".

OpenGL users too, will have an unfair advantage, being able to look straight up and down, instead just a little bit in the software mode... the results can be quite comical, as seen in this demo of a Deathmatch between Tails (A.J. Freda) and Sonikku (Me)... I don't know if A.J. makes a habit of this... ;-D

"I was NOT using OpenGL Sonikku! I told you! I was just able to do...this.... hehehe" - A.J.

Sonic had a good day today.

"Wait a minute! Did I hear you say Deathmatch mode back then? So DooM is going to be in this then?!" - If that's what you're thinking then don't worry, in this version, we were still using the old DooM Legacy engine, which meant that we could only Deathmatch or CoOp in Netplay. This won't be in the final version! Unless you use a cheat code, you won't be blowing off the heads of any robots with a sawed-off shotgun (or a chainsaw, if you're A.J...) - I can't stress this enough!

Next time: Add-ons!