PowerPlay
- By McTurbo; edited by Slick.
PowerPlay Article: from Computer Gaming World Magazine.
March 2000 Issue 188 Page34 & 35
The End of Lag?
'Valve and Cisco Team Up to Revolutionize Internet Gaming'
If your email arrives 500 milliseconds late, do you care? No. If you lose a couple of frames playing Unreal
Tournament or Team Fortress Classic online, do you care? well considering that some 12-year-old creep in
Poughkeepsie called BLUD_DRINKER probably killed you as a result, not only do you care, but you're also
very, very angry, The fact is, the Internet wasn't designed as a gaming platform: It was designed as a
way for NASA, university researchers, and evil geniuses around the globe to exchange simple, text-based
information. Framerate-dependent shooters and real-time strategy games have pretty much moved on from
ASCII graphics, and your phone line is simply choking on the huge amount of information it's being asked
to fire back and forth between you and that annoying pre-adolescent.
But now, God willing, that's all going to change.
What Valve's Half-Life did for the shooter, so does Valve hope that their PowerPlay project--started in
conjunction with Cisco--will do for online gaming. Their goals simple: to bring LAN-quality gaming
performance to the online arena, so that Internet becomes the dominant entertainment platform of the near
future. That's so, in Valve co-founder Gabe Newell's words "TEAM FORTRESS 2 can compete with rerun of
Friends."
You Down With UDP?
So what the heck is PowerPlay, and how is it going to revolutionize online gaming? It's a set of protocols and deployment standards, involving such popular cocktail-party topics as UDP header compression and basic infrastructure--including router and access concentrator issues--that should create LAN-type
performance for dial-up users, as well as for those gamers languishing away on overcrowded cable modem
and DSL subnets. PowerPlay is more than just some sort of elaborate TCP/IP patch; it's a suite of
technological improvements that will impact he whole experience of Internet gaming.
Think of it in terms of the sound you hear in a movie theatre: The sharp Dolby audio is an encoding standard that ensures high-quality sound recording, while the THX that brings the sound to life is a deployment standard that ensures that the quality of recording is played back in the best possible way. The analogy here with PowerPlay is that it does the same sort of thing--efficiently encoding data and maximizing its performance and playback. There's also one other way to look at it: It should be unbelievably fast. And it will be demonstrably fast, shipping with a simple bench marking tool so that gamers can compare online game performance between a game's PowerPlay and non-PowerPlay enhanced versions.
A comparison to OpenGL is also appropriate since Valve, working closely with Cisco--the 800-pound gorilla of Internet router business--won't be charging any licensing fees or turning a profit on the technology. The initial PowerPLay release schedule is planned in two separate hashes for this year. Currently, Cisco and Valve are focusing on industry initiative: asking ISPs to check it and support it; putting the infrastructure in place; making it available to application developers; and reaching out to the online community and convincing them to support PowerPlay-certified networks.
To that end, PowerPlay 1.0 will make its big debut in conjunction with a major--but as yet unnamed--national ISP, offering both a free month of service and a free, non Half-Life-dependent version of TEAM FORTRESS CLASSIC. That should happen by March.
Newell expects other game companies to jump aboard later this year with 2.0 since it will be focused on even lower client latency, bandwidth reservation, and voice integration.
At that point, the modular nature of the technology will allow developers to patch existing games easily making them PowerPlay-compliant within weeks. By releasing the code specifications to all participants at the point, Valve expects to focus on developing its own games and letting a growing PowerPlay project take care of itself.
Seeing Is Believing
Granted, it was just a "Before and After PowerPlay" MPEG of TFC, but the demonstration we saw was impressive. The weird skipping, dancing movement of characters in the gameworld was replaced with seamless animation, and aiming a weapon was a revelation--you could actually aim at an enemy with a sniper rifle instead of guessing where he'd be in 1.3 seconds. Every type of game would benefit, from shooters to the new breed of 3D real-time strat games to the overcrowded realms of massively-multiplayer RPG's to finally allowing sports gamers to play--and not just managing games online.
Count on CGW(computer gaming world) to keep you up to the minute on this potentially monuments technology in future issues.
--Robert Coffey
POWER PLAYERS
So will your favorite game embrace PowerPlay? Probably. As of press time the following developers had already signed on to the project:
Epic (Unreal, Unreal Tournament)
BioWare (MDK 2, Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights)
Looking Glass (System Shock 2, Thief 2, Flight Unlimited)
Outrage Entertainment (Descent 3)
Red Storm Entertainement (Rainbow Six, Rogue Spear)
Volition (Freespace 2)
Ritual (Heavy Metal, F.A.K.K.2, Sin)
Shiny Entertainment (messiah, Sacrifice, R/C Stund Copter)
Relic Entertainment (Homeworld)
Ensemble Stuidios (Age of Empires I & II)
Captivation Digital Laboratories (quake: Da Bomb mod, Lose Your Marbles)
Gearbox Software (Half-Life, Opposing Force)
(out of the march 2000 issue of Computer Gaming World)
If you just can't get enough PowerPlay information, check out
our copy of the press release and interview with Valve.
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