Multiplayer WCP/SO?

J

Jason_Ryock

Vice Admiral
I extracted all the files in "data.tre" file from my Secret Ops download and ran across an interesting file called "netgame.eng".

The text for the file is as follows:

Invalid Message
has died
has left the game
Disconnected from server

Was a multiplayer feature planned for WCP/SO and then left out of the game? And (Much like the reference to the stealth not working against bug technology) this simply got left in the game?


[EDIT]
That was in the data.tre/language/ folder for anyone who went looking. Also, in the same directory, another .eng file this one for "netmenu.eng".
 
I seem to recall hearing about a lot of things that never got implemented in the game, such as switching ships in the middle of a mission, picking up powerups, and massive multiplayer capabilities.

Admittedly, only the multiplayer sounded any good.
 
You can switch ships mid-mission in X-Wing Alliance, which is a pretty nice feature actually. The start of one mission your fighting off a flight of those nasty Assualt Transports, and you can take a B-Wing, and then later swap it out for an X-Wing when the general melee with the fighters and bombers start.

Also gives you the option to re-arm torps and countermeasures mid-mission, which is nice, though I don't think it's possible to repair damage...but I digress...


So far I've identified at least five files in the data.tre file that seem to be for multiplayer only uses, and a few more that seem to refer directly to Wing Commander prophecy and don't seem to have any use (A good example of this would be a simulator text file for the Prophecy simulator, which we all know isn't usable in Secret Ops without a patch that contains its OWN simtext file).

Why were these files left in the Secret Ops download? If I'm doing the math right the data.tre file is 45 Megabytes of a 115 megabyte download, cutting all this crap out would make the download smaller, wouldn't it? Or does it still serve some purpose?

Was Secret Ops just a crash job to preserve the WC Fans? I always thought they put more effort into it then that, but I'm starting to wonder...
 
Maybe Origin had plans to follow it up with a multiplayer patch to be downloaded, and something happend within the company to halt that. Maybe someone should e-mail them and ask?
 
Jason_Ryock said:
Why were these files left in the Secret Ops download? If I'm doing the math right the data.tre file is 45 Megabytes of a 115 megabyte download, cutting all this crap out would make the download smaller, wouldn't it? Or does it still serve some purpose?

Was Secret Ops just a crash job to preserve the WC Fans? I always thought they put more effort into it then that, but I'm starting to wonder...
Click to expand...

What else do you think it was? It's a great full-length full-featured game, but it was made in just a matter of months and given away mostly for free. And out of 115 megs, a few stray image files and text code wouldn't have affected it very much.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
The days of optimizing video game code to the bit ended long before Secret Ops came out.
Click to expand...

That's very true. Rememeber those old games that had the small and big install versions? The small one would leave part of the game either out or compacted.
 
Oh, I see. Yes, in that case, long long gone.

Last game I installed from floppy disk was . . . Castles II . . . long long ago.
 
Isn't it in their best interest to optimize the file size though? It would conserve bandwidth...

I guess your right though, a few stray files wouldn't matter much...I guess if I was running the project I would have done it perfectly, or tried to...

So another question, then. How do we know all the files we need to run a multiplayer WCP game aren't hidden away somewhere and we've just been overlooking them because they don't do anything and aren't accessed anywhere?
 
Jason_Ryock said:
I guess your right though, a few stray files wouldn't matter much...I guess if I was running the project I would have done it perfectly, or tried to...?
Click to expand...

No, no you wouldn't have. :)

Jason_Ryock said:
So another question, then. How do we know all the files we need to run a multiplayer WCP game aren't hidden away somewhere and we've just been overlooking them because they don't do anything and aren't accessed anywhere?
Click to expand...

Well, Origin couldn't get it to work well. It'd be a miracle if one of us could.
 
Not to mention the multiplayer had some new ship functions. The turret at the front of the Vampire was suppose to help shoot down incoming missiles.
 
I would have removed the extraneous files if I was working on the project.

Did you know, for example, that the WVE and UV2 (I think that second one is right) comms signals from the Midway are stored in the data.tre file? (Or is it the speech.tre file? One of the two.)

I've played all the way through Secret Ops and not seen any of those videos, some of which run for a few minutes.
 
The Midway shows up on the losing path, IIRC.

But no, it's not in their best interest to recode their executable to take out ten kilobytes of multiplayer menu text... modern games are developed with release date/cost in mind.
 
Jason_Ryock said:
Isn't it in their best interest to optimize the file size though? It would conserve bandwidth...
Click to expand...

No. I actually learned the following in university:
a) It is more important to write readable (aka easy to fix) code then to write efficient code.
b) It is usually cheaper to write slow code and buy a fast computer then to spend the money on optimizing the code.

This is the mindset that has us forced to use a 1Ghz Machine just to write a letter, while we menaged to get to the moon with the calculation power of 3 C64 Computers....

Is this a good development? No, not at all IMHO. But it is where the industry is moving righ now. Heck you can be glad if you still learn assembler language nowadays.
 
Well, you're also forgetting Amdahl's law:

1) Rule of thumb: 90% of the time is spent in 10% of the code.
2) If you speed up the least-used 90% of the code by an infinite amount, your program becomes 10% faster.
3) If you speed up the most-used 10% of the code by an infinite amout, your program becomes 90% faster.

In other words, for 1/9th the effort, you get 9 times the speed up. If your program takes 10 seconds to run now, the first option might require 9 hours to get the run time down to 9 seconds, while the second option would only require 1 hour, but get the run time down to 1 second. Also note that this assumes that you're able to speed up selected portions of the program by an infinite amount; when you look at more practical scenarios, the comparison becomes even more stark.

These numbers are ideal, but the lesson remains: Programmer time is a limited resource; you can't economically afford or physically obtain unlimited programmer-hours. Best spend that time on what you can improve most effectively.

If the compare the cost of writing the very small amount of code which ran the Moon computers to the cost of the word processor you run on that 1 GHz machine, there's a clear win. Of course, the word processor has developed over the years and the 1 GHz machine didn't appear overnight, but in today's world, the trade-offs are not only inevitable, but make a lot of sense.

Coding something with the complexity of modern programs completely in assembly language would lead to more bugs, cost more, take longer, be harder to fix, and be less portable to new architectures (Privateer on Windows XP, anyone?). You just don't win when you waste human resources like that.

And anyway, my word processor doesn't require a 1 GHz machine to run. I used to run my word processor happily on a 100 MHz machine when everyone was buying 500 MHz machines. Microsoft will bloat their programs, but even they don't really use all the computational power we have today. We get 2 GHz machines not because we need them, but because they cost about as much these days as the 1 GHz machines.

Put this another way: would you rather have that time spent on including a decent storyline and the pretty new models, or would you have them spend their time searching all the code for useless text strings which only added a few bytes and microseconds of download time to the compressed version of Secret Ops?
 
I just want multiplayer. :( These Nephilim and Kilrathi would be much more challenging if there were human players controlling them instead of AI.
 
GeeBot said:
Put this another way: would you rather have that time spent on including a decent storyline and the pretty new models, or would you have them spend their time searching all the code for useless text strings which only added a few bytes and microseconds of download time to the compressed version of Secret Ops?
Click to expand...
Well, it's a funny thing. Just as I was typing in my reply to your post, my computer crashed. You know, one of those random crashes that we all grudgingly begun to tolerate in the mid-90s, and eventually accepted as the normal state of things, to the point where we barely even notice them any more. This illustrates cff's point very well. The issue in question isn't a few bytes wasted on useless text strings. It's not even the stupid little 3d pseudo-game easter egg that wastes half a megabyte of space when you install Excel. The issue is the general state of software - a state so fucked up that we accept random system failures as normal. If the Moon landing software was designed by a development company of today, it would have ended up giving the word 'crash' a whole new meaning :p.
 
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