hacked GT3 internet play

[BrianCNorton]

So, I ran across an article about some bored japanese kids that hacked their ps2 with broadband connections so they could map the i-link port across the internet, and have two players on two playstations far away from each other playing some game or another in vs mode. Apparently there were some lag issues, which brought up an interesting thought. The problem is that I cant find the article again. Has anybody seen this or heard about it?

Assuming that it isnt a bunch of bull, do you think it would be realistic to play gt3 over the internet? This is a problem for whatever future GTNetwork game they put out. The controls on that game are so percise that I have a VERY hard time seeing it done with a 50ms network lag. (cable or DSL) The only games that I can see working like this are the types that people already play on the PC. (shooters, RTS, adventure, etc) Any thoughts?

Brian

 

[GilesGuthrie]

Well the beauty of GT3 is that you don't need to transmit that much information down the link in order for it to work. If you're in a head-to-head battle with another player, all you need to transmit is the car's position, speed and acceleration vectors.

This would mean that you could sending time-syncing information also, which would make each player's car handle correctly for them, the lack would just come in updating the opponent's car. This would then only be a problem when you were racing wheel to wheel, but I'm sure there are plenty programmers who could code their way out of that one!

 

[LoudMusic]

Originally posted by GilesGuthrie
Well the beauty of GT3 is that you don't need to transmit that much information down the link in order for it to work. If you're in a head-to-head battle with another player, all you need to transmit is the car's position, speed and acceleration vectors.

This would mean that you could sending time-syncing information also, which would make each player's car handle correctly for them, the lack would just come in updating the opponent's car. This would then only be a problem when you were racing wheel to wheel, but I'm sure there are plenty programmers who could code their way out of that one!

Well stated. There is so little information required to communicate 'who, what, when, where' in a racing game, that I believe any broadband connectin, even ISDN, could handle the minor load. But bandwidth and latency aren't the same thing, though they are related. Jumping across several Internet providers' networks could generate some pretty bad latency. If both players were on the same cable network, or DLS network, I don't think they'd see much of a difference from standard iLink.

As for the 'bored Japanese kids', I think it's possible. The way it would be done wouldn't be through hacking the PS2, though. They probably jacked their PS2s into their computers via a firewire port and passed all the data to a program that was talking to the other computer. That would generate a "firewire bridge" over the Internet. A very cool concept ...

Someone else has already done that with the XBox. The XBox has a built in 10/100 network jack, but it doesn't know how to talk "Internet". So some Japanese kids threw an extra network card in each of their computers and bridged "XBox lingo" across the Internet. Once again, v
very cool ....

I hope that answers your questions.

~LoudMusic

 

[BrianCNorton]

I see what you are saying, but lets pretend you have relatively low network lag, 50ms. Lets also suppose that you need to only transmit 1 bit of data, as I think that the quantity of data is irrelevant. When you are doing the license tests, 50 ms of reaction time is the difference between running up the inside and spinning out. I suppose the computer could relax the physics a bit.

One way to test this I suppose would be to build a little "controller slower" with a basic delay circuit, and slap it between the controller and the console. Hmm, project for xmas perhaps.

I think network play is great, and would work fine for most things, but timing is so crucial in this game. Thanks for the feedback

 

[LoudMusic]

Originally posted by BrianCNorton
I see what you are saying, but lets pretend you have relatively low network lag, 50ms. Lets also suppose that you need to only transmit 1 bit of data, as I think that the quantity of data is irrelevant. When you are doing the license tests, 50 ms of reaction time is the difference between running up the inside and spinning out. I suppose the computer could relax the physics a bit.

One way to test this I suppose would be to build a little "controller slower" with a basic delay circuit, and slap it between the controller and the console. Hmm, project for xmas perhaps.

I think network play is great, and would work fine for most things, but timing is so crucial in this game. Thanks for the feedback

Well, network lag is pretty crucial in first person shooters too. 1ms is the difference between who gets their rocket off first. (: We've been playing online shooters for nearly a decade. They'll relax the physics a bit and everything will be alright.

~LoudMusic

 

[Tom M]

I've tooled around with the Xbox Internet support through Gamespy, and here's the problem. The games are designed to run on at least a 10mb/sec lan. When designing the games with no internet connectivity in mind, the game manufacturers seemed to use as much bandwidth as possible to keep the gameplay smooth.
While GT3 probably uses the least amount of bandwidth a game could, I'm betting that it's throwing around some heavy duty numbers. (64-128k/sec per person playing) I'd guess that it's probably not realistically possible unless you are off a T1 system. (Halo needs at least 256k/sec per person to run smooth)
Without coding for advanced predictions you would probably see some funky car movement and lag in the game.
I'm not saying that it's not possible, I just know that it's going to be tougher than it's probably worth.
Having said that, I will say that Tony Hawk 3 over the internet plays as smooth as you could possibly imagine, and if they can reproduce that in GT4 (or GT online) then we are all in for a treat.
In my brain I always felt that it was a simple task to tie two pc's together and fool a console into thinking it was hooked directly to another, but I never took into considerationg the lag involved in just the PC X-fer let alone a dedicated stream of bandwidth. Until I played Halo.