Homing Missles Question

by **organic io (formerly goldie)** » Thu Mar 17, 2016 1:11 am

So after viewing the old UDL match listing, and seeing some of my comments, I noticed I had a tendency to call people "homer boaters", a term I honestly don't even remember.

But I seem to recall that back in the days of D1X, the behavior of homers was directly related to your CPU speed. Is this correct? They were handled client side, and if you had a faster CPU, they would track you faster and therefore be harder to avoid.

At the time of UDL in 2002, I believe I had an Athlon 1.2ghz which was pretty snappy for the time. There were faster, but I'm sure lots of people that were using slower CPU's too. So I wonder, if I played against someone on, say, a 300mhz Pentium II, wouldn't I have been at a huge disadvantage? I seem to remember having great difficulty dodging homers at the time, a problem I didn't have on earlier computers. I still had my K6-2 550 around, I wonder why I didn't use it to play Descent?

When Descent was being developed, let's say 1994, the fastest CPU available was Pentium 100. So, they designed homing missles a certain way and they behaved a certain way on computers of the time (the average person's PC was more like a 486 DX2/66).

So I guess they didn't anticipate that homers would behave differently on faster computers. Fast forward 8 years to 2002 and you've got computers that are literally 10 times as fast and now homers are a complete nightmare to dodge. It's similar to old DOS programs that were dependent on the 8088 CPU timing and ran too fast on faster PC's.. Except not quite as extreme.

So I wonder, how does Rebirth handle all this? Does it put a limit on the homer tracking so everybody is on an even playing field? I lol'ed when I thought about how bad homers would be on a 3ghz quad core machine if they kept the same trend they did 14 years ago.. That's just not even right!

It seeeems like Rebirth should try to simulate the conditions of PC's around 1994, i.e. somewhere between a 486sx33 and a Pentium 100, and try to get the homer tracking similar to that. But anyway!

Just curious to know.

by **Sirius** » Thu Mar 17, 2016 2:14 am

The original homing missile behavior was synced to your framerate. And that was proportional to CPU speed, so... yeah, effectively that's what happened. Homing missiles became impossible to dodge on late 90s hardware, until they started bringing in framecaps - and people would usually set those pretty low (30 fps or so) to get things back to how they were used to them. I believe D1X introduced this, though, so in the UDL era that might have been what you were doing.

Rebirth provisionally "fixed" it by scaling the updates homing missiles would make each frame to how long that frame lasted. Unfortunately, this was subsequently demonstrated not to be truly framerate independent - and it also behaved substantially differently from the original homing weapon code. Retro went back and returned the homing code to its original behavior but forced it to run only 30 (I think) times per second, regardless of what the video framerate was.

by **Morfod** » Thu Mar 17, 2016 6:23 am

You've nailed it. In fact, some of the problems of older pilots coming back to the modern era is the stigma of holding down the secondary fire button. I've had opponents threaten to never play me again because I was a missile boater!

As a result, no-homers and low-homers levels became quite popular. Athena NH was probably to most well-known, as well as Nysa NH and Io NH. Satan's Hell Hole was popular in that era due to only having one homer and one smart.

As Sirius mentioned, homers and smarts in Retro track in a framerate independent manner. In fact, that is how Retro got its name: D1X-Rebirth with Retro homers mod.

by **Entropy** » Thu Mar 17, 2016 6:34 am

by **Jediluke** » Thu Mar 17, 2016 11:42 am

At this point it seems ideal to play at 200 FPS (the max) since the homers and smarts behave as though you are at 30 FPS roughly.

The homers in Rebirth were completely rediculous. D1x-Rebirth Retro-mod exists BECAUSE the homers were rediculous in Rebirth.

Now, since then Retro has included A LOT of fixes and features!!!! designed mainly around competitive 1 v 1 play but there are also plenty of features for the anarchy crowd too.

It has become the defacto version of Descent / Rebirth etc.

Because of the homer/missiles fix in retro...we now play way more XTRA MISSILES games as opposed to LH or NH. And we generally do this in even smaller levels than before.

Retro is now better than the original ever was. Period.

by **Sirius** » Fri Mar 18, 2016 3:54 am

Would you play Wrath with mega missiles?

by **bahamut** » Fri Mar 18, 2016 5:12 am

d1retro, d1x, rebirth all have their good points

by **Jediluke** » Fri Mar 18, 2016 11:26 am

I've done mega pillbox x4

by **Djcjr** » Fri Mar 18, 2016 11:32 am

by **Drakona** » Fri Mar 18, 2016 12:32 pm

Good lord. You have no fewer than SEVEN matches played in some flavor of mega pillbox.

http://descentchampions.org/view_match.php?id=6541
http://descentchampions.org/view_match.php?id=2616
http://descentchampions.org/view_match.php?id=2615
http://descentchampions.org/view_match.php?id=2277
http://descentchampions.org/view_match.php?id=2193
http://descentchampions.org/view_match.php?id=2079
http://descentchampions.org/view_match.php?id=1916