NINition·Nov 21, 2022
A while ago most people thought QuakeWorld was the first game to do client-side prediction. Carmack has a .plan from 1996 talking about it so there's a clear reference.
But one day I went to the wiki page for client-side prediction and it said Duke Nukem 3D was first which I thought was curious, so I checked the reference on it and it was a recent interview with Ken Silverman - creator of the Build engine that DN3D ran on - which clearly stated DN3D was first:
> "People may point out that Quake’s networking code was better due to its drop-in networking support, [but] it did not support client side prediction in the beginning,” he explains. “That’s something I had come up with first and implemented in the January 1996 release of Duke 3D shareware."
Pretty unfair for Ken, I thought, that everyone’s got the wrong idea that it’s QuakeWorld. S
Read the rest
ince the source is available, with the help of Hacker News we even found the code for it in game.c[0].
To be a good citizen I went back over to the Wikipedia page and added a link to the source code to help solidify the claim. But while I was there I went back and read the interview again, and noticed a part I’d skimmed the first time:
> "It kind of pisses me off that the Wikipedia page article on ‘client side prediction’ gives credit to Quakeworld due to a lack of credible citations about Duke 3D."
I wondered if and when it had been changed from saying Duke 3D to QuakeWorld in the past (before eventually being changed back again sometime after the interview), so I went and had a look through the page history. It had been changed a few years ago due to lack of any citations. And the person who had removed it... was me.
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[0] https://github.com/videogamepreservation/dukenukem3d/blob/ef...
See domovethings(), fakedomovethings(), and fakedomovethingscorrect().