How does COD4 and others actually work?

[Ol Smoke]

Have you ever played a table hockey game? COD4 is the same, except the players can move in all directions. The server supplies the table and that is all it does. Your PC supplies the player and the view inside the game. By utilizing a command structure that both the server and the PC share, the server understands what you are doing and you can see what other players are doing.

 

So lets put a camera into the eye of our stick player on the table hockey game. Lets then mount him on a wire that lets him spin, move up and down, move his arms and legs (sort of) and pull and sight his weapon. So now we have our teams. Red and Blue. The field of the table is green and the players can move on any green surface. Now we cut out brown walls and place them around the field. The brown color tells the PC that their player cannot cross that line or go through it. So now you can move your guy forward and backward through the green field but now you can hide behind a wall. The wall can be two different colors of brown. Regular brown and dark brown. Regular brown means that bullets can go through it, but not nades or AS. The dark brown means nothing can go thru it. So now we have our walls done. But what we can do now is create holes in the brown and replace it with green and we can make the green go up and down. So all we have to do is build layers upon layers of walls and floors using these colors. By designating some impregnable walls we can keep the play area within a set boundary. This gives us our map.

 

Now with the map done, we insert our players into it. Each player is given a set of instructions by the program. One of the main instuctions is this: You can walk on any brown or green horizontal surface. You cannot walk on or climb on any surface that is vertical in nature. But the map makers wanted to add a few special areas to the map as secrets. So they set up another color surface. Lets say pink. Any surface made or coated in pink allows the player to climb up on it. Ladders, windows, cans, etc. Now sometimes pink, brown and green get mixed up into a new color, when they all come together at a point. This is a glitch. It can allow a player to go into this area and not be seen by others. But it allows him to see others and shoot them. The worst of these was in COD/UO. A row of trees, that in one spot, allowed a player to hide and kill and not be killed. As these glitches are found, they are banned from use. So anyhow, we can now get up on ladders and such and move around the map. So lets play.

 

As you look around the map you are actually inside a circle in side a square map. Each of the players is actually a tube that can move in all directions. What you see is a representation of the map. Not the real map. Okay you are confused. Lets take clear handi-wrap and make a tube of it. Put our guy inside the tube. What do you see? The map. But its not the true map. Its an image of the map on the outside of the handiwrap that you are actually seeing. It is done this way to give each player their space to move in and to see what is actually happening to them. If it wasn't done this way, we would see everybody doing everything and it would be a giant distorted image. This way we see what we are looking at, and others see what they are looking at. If not, then we would see what everybody is looking at, at the same time. This is called field generated massed visioning. The best way to put this is this way. If we relied on the server to send us the picture, it would only see the whole map, and send it all to us at the same time. This is why most of the early multiplayer games failed before they got to the developer. Wolfenstein could not overcome this problem. But when Quake came out, they had figured it out. That is why all of the games prior to the current ones, (COD4 is about the last one) used the Quake engines to produce this effect. The new ones are built on multilayer web graphic engines where each PC is part of the server base. Thats why they play better.

 

I hope this helps you understand a little of how this magical world is created.

 

*Thanks to Jim at Activision for helping me understand this a long time ago.

[Dddrgn]

fanceh words confuse my brain, but this makes the game sound way more awesome somewhow.

[daBroviest]

My mind is relatively blown.

[UAdave]

That's pretty cool. I enjoy reading your topics, very intresting. Keep them coming if you have them