Comment by arscan
18 hours ago
The Kali TCP/IP IPX bridge allowed you to play this multiplayer over the internet, and the style of game was tolerant to low bandwidth and high pings. Which made this one of the first games that really provided a glimpse of the future of gaming (for better or worse, much of gaming has moved away from single person campaigns to multiplayer). I have so many great memories of this era in gaming because of this game and the handful of others that Kali supported (descent, doom 2).
Oh man. I remember having to send a check for $20 to some address to get my key.
That was such a game changer for online play. Before that, to play Warcraft II my friend and I had to coordinate to set up a game, then call their model directly, and hope our parents didn't pick up the phone thinking it was a regular call.
After Kali, we could just sign on and join games. We also got to play as a team, which was so much fun. Friends2v2 was the map and game type we played SO MUCH. We had various strategies that we got really good at (mostly grunt rushing and offensive towering). I miss those games.
Do you or someone reading this know who would be the best person that would be willing to come on a guest on a podcast and has the correct knowledge (ideally the person who implemented in WC3, or something similar enough).
Asking as I'm the host of netstack.fm, a podcast about networking and rust, but some episodes are just about networking alone.
Would love to devote an episode to the Kali TCP/IP IPX bridge as there's a lot to unpack there and that can be learned from. Any tips for a guest for such an episode are more than welcome!
In grad school 15+ years ago I took a ‘user-centered innovation’ class and I wrote a paper on the topic of Kali and its predecessor: how gamers, not the game devs, made games built for IPX work across the internet. What is neat is early collab on the first ipx->tcp/ip bridge happened on Usenet, so you can find a record of the first doom deathmatch coordinated and played over the internet. I think I reached out to jay cotton (author of kali) via email and he answered my questions, so I’d try to track him down if I were you.
Sadly I didn’t make a backup of my paper (not sure how I managed to screw that up), so I no longer have it.
The poor floating point performance of many PCs at the time meant that a lot of code used ints rather than floats, making determinism much easier for multiplayer!
I believe DOOM and Warcraft 2 simply did lockstep determinism across all clients. You could run the simulations forward completely deterministically due to use of its and fixed point math.
Quake did as well all the way up to Quake 3 I believe. The game was basically on a heartbeat based on the worst latency of the connected player. Everything got synchronized that way.
Back in the day, your gaming could be super wrecked if someone with a 300ms latency joined :D.
If TabithaS from Case's Ladder is out there somewhere, thank you for playing teaching games of Warcraft 2 with me!
A free alternative was MSN Gaming Zone.
Ran inside IE using ActiveX or something. Was pretty neat.
There are more high-quality single player campaigns coming out now than there were then. Single-player gaming seems to have grown since then. Just not as much as multi-player.
Kali ruled. I played a modified version of Hellfire (unofficial Diablo expansion that technically didn't support multiplayer) on Kali for the longest time. GTX_Rage, if you're here, I want to talk to you!
Oh no way I didn’t know Hellfire was unofficial. I don’t even remember where I got it back in the day but I still remember the CD..
Hellfire was a released commercial product.... But it was released by Sierra On-Line, not Blizzard.
Both companies were owned by the same conglomorate (at the time?), and cooperation was limited.
There was also WarCraft II Battle.net edition, launched in '99
Kali was awesome!
I had a lot of fun using Cases Ladder to find matches.
I know the game was horribly unbalanced against humans once bloodlust showed up, but I still quit after they "patched" bloodlust years later in Battle.net. Felt sacrilege, like patching the queen in chess. Yeah, the queen is imba, but that's chess. Beating an orc player as a human was a fun flex.