[ACow_Adonis]

I took advantage of that to defeat a hacker in an online game once.

the hacker had changed his infantry so they were very cheap, and fired different weapons. he planned to win by building a barracks and spamming out his super soldiers. but there's one thing he hadn't counted on: dogs.

not only did they have the dog projectile behaviour, but infantry also had a behaviour where they had a few seconds when emerging from a barracks where they had a running animation, we're targets, but couldn't fire.

by spamming dogs, and sitting one directly outside each barracks he built, I effectively plugged each inflow of super soldier, as the dog would turn into a projectile and instantly kill all emerging infantry.

good times. and that was a particularly satisfying rage quit...

[SketchySeaBeast]

So which rules.ini does the game follow? Whoever hosts I would think? Were you hosting the hacker?

[sgtnoodle]

I would have thought the multiplayer code would assume deterministic consistent calculations on all clients, and only share human inputs with a cycle delay to mask the network delays. If that were the case, though, then things would get weird very quickly, and likely end with a failed assertion somewhere and the game erroring out.

Perhaps instead all calculations are performed on one client, and the full game state is transfered to the rest, perhaps with some sort of delta encoding? That seems like a fairly high bandwidth approach for the 90s, but I suppose it depends on how clever they were with the state representations.

Explicitly sharing one client's rules.ini would of course be a reasonable hypothesis. Maybe there was a good reason for that during development, perhaps so that gameplay designers could quickly iterate without having to copy files back and forth with coworkers?

[NickNameNick]

As I remember, for direct-dial-up games, both players had to have an identical rules.ini file or the game would instantly announce a desync error when the second player joined the game.

[ACow_Adonis]

sorry, was what, 20 years ago now? can't remember the details (or how the multiplayer aspect/engine worked back in the day) other than the story. I do remember I probably wasn't hosting, but I also didn't have insight into what the hacker was doing except what could be observed in-game :(

[spiritplumber]

If it was the DOS version of Red Alert 1, it used the host rules