Why is it so difficult to add doors?

so it was possible with PS1 on 64kbit ISDN but not on 1MBit DSL/Cable ... OK

I think most people that want doors are sick of the possibility to just walk into a base. There's nothing wrong in having stuff like SGD or jumping over walls but its **** to just walk into places like the octagon or those other fortresses. even if there never will be real doors at least have triggered 2 way force fields. once a hacker cracked the system its usable by all factions.
Another point are those esamir vehicle pad jump over the wall things - horrible. Thats why people like to have something like doors.

Because Jim Morrison died 3d of july 1971...

Completely unrelated. Has nothing to do with bandwidth. It is a player count and server load issue.

You might also recall that it worked like utter crap in PS1...which had far fewer players.

They should just use shield doors that you can get through by bringing down the generator (which like the Rebel Base in Empire Strikes Back are always located outside the protection of the shields for the sake of convenience of story/gameplay.)

Actually, there's a base kinda like that on Amerish, where you have to destroy a topside gen to get into the subterranean base... they need more of that kind of stuff.

Remember. You asked for this.


The Door Problem

Premise: You are making a game.

Are there doors in your game?
Can the player open them?
Can the player open every door in the game?
Or are some doors for decoration?
How does the player know the difference?
Are doors you can open green and ones you can’t red? Is there trash piled up in front of doors you can’t use? Did you just remove the doorknobs and call it a day?
Can doors be locked and unlocked?
What tells a player a door is locked and will open, as opposed to a door that they will never open?
Does a player know how to unlock a door? Do they need a key? To hack a console? To solve a puzzle? To wait until a story moment passes?
Are there doors that can open but the player can never enter them?
Where do enemies come from? Do they run in from doors? Do those doors lock afterwards?
How does the player open a door? Do they just walk up to it and it slides open? Does it swing open? Does the player have to press a button to open it?
Do doors lock behind the player?
What happens if there are two players? Does it only lock after both players pass through the door?
What if the level is REALLY BIG and can’t all exist at the same time? If one player stays behind, the floor might disappear from under them. What do you do?
Do you stop one player from progressing any further until both are together in the same room?
Do you teleport the player that stayed behind?
What size is a door?
Does it have to be big enough for a player to get through?
What about co-op players? What if player 1 is standing in the doorway – does that block player 2?
What about allies following you? How many of them need to get through the door without getting stuck?
What about enemies? Do mini-bosses that are larger than a person also need to fit through the door?


It’s a pretty classic design problem. SOMEONE has to solve The Door Problem, and that someone is a designer.


The Other Door Problems
To help people understand the role breakdowns at a big company, I sometimes go into how other people deal with doors.

Creative Director: “Yes, we definitely need doors in this game.”
Project Manager: “I’ll put time on the schedule for people to make doors.”
Designer: “I wrote a doc explaining what we need doors to do.”

Concept Artist: “I made some gorgeous paintings of doors.”
Art Director: “This third painting is exactly the style of doors we need.”
Environment Artist: “I took this painting of a door and made it into an object in the game.”

Animator: “I made the door open and close.”
Sound Designer: “I made the sounds the door creates when it opens and closes.”
Audio Engineer: “The sound of the door opening and closing will change based on where the player is and what direction they are facing.”

Composer: “I created a theme song for the door.”
FX Artist: “I added some cool sparks to the door when it opens.”
Writer: “When the door opens, the player will say, ‘Hey look! The door opened!’ “

Lighter: “There is a bright red light over the door when it’s locked, and a green one when it’s opened.”
Legal: “The environment artist put a Starbucks logo on the door. You need to remove that if you don’t want to be sued.”
Character Artist: “I don’t really care about this door until it can start wearing hats.”

Gameplay Programmer: “This door asset now opens and closes based on proximity to the player. It can also be locked and unlocked through script.”
AI Programmer: “Enemies and allies now know if a door is there and whether they can go through it.”
Network Programmer: “Do all the players need to see the door open at the same time?”

Release Engineer: “You need to get your doors in by 3pm if you want them on the disk.”
Core Engine Programmer: “I have optimized the code to allow up to 1024 doors in the game.”
Tools Programmer: “I made it even easier for you to place doors.”

Level Designer: “I put the door in my level and locked it. After an event, I unlocked it.”
UI Designer: “There’s now an objective marker on the door, and it has its own icon on the map.”
Combat Designer: “Enemies will spawn behind doors, and lay cover fire as their allies enter the room. Unless the player is looking inside the door in which case they will spawn behind a different door.”

Systems Designer: “A level 4 player earns 148xp for opening this door at the cost of 3 gold.”
Monetization Designer: “We could charge the player $.99 to open the door now, or wait 24 hours for it to open automatically.”
QA Tester: “I walked to the door. I ran to the door. I jumped at the door. I stood in the doorway until it closed. I saved and reloaded and walked to the door. I died and reloaded then walked to the door. I threw grenades at the door.”

UX / Usability Researcher: “I found some people on Craigslist to go through the door so we could see what problems crop up.”
Localization: “Door. Puerta. Porta. Porte. Tür. Dør. Deur. Drzwi. Drws. 문”
Producer: “Do we need to give everyone those doors or can we save them for a pre-order bonus?”
Publisher: “Those doors are really going to help this game stand out during the fall line-up.”

CEO: “I want you all to know how much I appreciate the time and effort put into making those doors.”
PR: “To all our fans, you’re going to go crazy over our next reveal #gamedev #doors #nextgen #retweet”
Community Manager: “I let the fans know that their concerns about doors will be addressed in the upcoming patch.”

Customer Support: “A player contacted us, confused about doors. I gave them detailed instructions on how to use them.”
Player: “I totally didn’t even notice a door there.”





reposted from
http://www.lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door-problem/

Your flashlight is already textured. Just soon you can also use a different texture, that you already had in memory for cosmetics. Or maybe a couple new ones, but you're comparing a 256x256 texture only visible by you and the people in a 10 meter radius vs a door which needs to be synced for everyone in render range, and have an AI attached to control it, that also needs to be synced.

Doors definitely don't fit all that well in shooters. They were more clunky than beneficial in PS1, and I don't miss them at all in PS2.

PS1 was a 10 year old game and handled doors fine. I don't know what people are talking about having problems with doors inPS1. I played that game for thousands of hours and doors almost never caused problems for me. I think maybe a few times, out of the thousands of times I went through them, they didn't open right away, but so what?

The doors increased teamwork. You were vulnerable while hacking a door, so you wanted to have someone watching your back. It was tense waiting for a buddy to hack a door, knowing somebody could jump out at you.

Also, MAXes couldn't hack doors, so they need support to get inside buildings (or wait for an enemy dumb enough to open the door for them).

Everyone complains about zerg zerg zerg in this game, well running blindly through doorways like a headless chicken is part of that. Slowing down, even for just a few seconds to hack a door, gives the game a more methodical rhythm.

This is very true, the game needs soul.

So I guess we can write off doors from now until the end of time for all MMOFPS because in 2003 they tried and failed? I'd call that “losing our way”.

Because with doors, HAXMAXes would be well and truly broken.

More players, more updates, more bandwidth.
The individual fights where not that different. But even if there were only 1/3 the players, it's not that we play on servers that have the capability like 10 years ago.

Because they chose the wrong game engine.

Doors are a fundamental challenge of network programming. No engine handles them well across a network. There is a reason games like Counterstrike, Battlefield, and Call of Duty shy away from them, and that reason is that the information related to the state of the door takes a non-zero amount of time to travel from client to server to all clients.

So, lets build a hypothetical scenario.

Lets say we have a door. The door starts closed. A player (with a 100ms ping to the server) approaches the door and presses 'E' to open it. What happens next?

Well, first, the Player sends the command to the server. 'I've pressed E on this door'. This message takes 100ms (your ping time) to reach the server. The server then must take that message and say 'Yes, you can open this door'. This computation is done in a single frame, which, assuming that the ps2 servers run at 30fps, takes 33ms to complete. The server then compiles a list of players that must receive the message and broadcasts to all players in the area that the door is open. This takes anywhere from 50 to 300ms for every player.

So, you have You, seeing the door open 233ms after pressing E, and other players, seeing the door open anywhere from 173ms after the door opens to upwards around 500-600ms after the door opens.

The average time to kill in Planetside 2 is anywhere from 400ms to 600ms, depending on the gun. That means that anyone who saw the door open sooner than you gets 2-3 shots on you before you even have a chance to see them. Someone with 400+ms ping? They are dead before the door even opens on their screen.

This hypothetical situation doesn't even account for client-side prediction... The effect of playing something on your screen before (or while) it happens on the server and mitigating the effect of lag (movement does this, as does shooting. You don't want to wait 300ms after pressing W to move forward). If doors were predicted on the client that opened them, that client would have a full 400ms+ time to shoot people through the door before they see it open

This is why most twitch games just don't use doors. If information could travel faster over the internet, then doors would be viable. Until then, It's simply not. Planetside 1 had MASSIVE issues with people shooting through doors (it's one of the reasons everyone hates Chinese players, they have 700ms+ ping times and can fire through doors a full second or more before you can), and other games like CounterStrike and Battlefield just never attempted to make them happen (or, in the case of CounterStrike, allowed bullets to penetrate closed doors to mitigate the effect).

It was possible in PS1 because of the game engine and graphics quality (for it's time). It would be a big performance hit to put doors in the game. Additionally, anyone in PS1 can hack a door with a REK. If there were doors in PS2, it would just be infiltratorside.

How many times were you shot or killed through a closed door? For me it was hundreds. This is why they didn't do it in PS2.

People say that, but doors in PS1 weren't that bad, they worked as they were supposed to most of the time, they only time they got iffy was in huge doorway spam battles which had proper grenade launchers (another thing PS2 "cannot" have) and gear packs dropped from every dead body (another thing PS2 "cannot" have) as well.

I also disagree with the player count, PS1 battles just after release and up to just after Core Combat were BIG, as big as I've seen in PS2 mostly (in fact aren't the new PS2 cont caps as lower or lower than the PS1 ones were anyway?).

If they cant do it because of engine limitations, then they could add smaller shields to work as a doors for some buildings, which blocks bullets from both sides. They´d be powered by single destroyable generator and Infiltrators could also hack them to let teammates pass through.

It's not an engine limitation at all. It's a design decision. Both Landmark and H1Z1 feature doors that swing open just fine, and they run on the same exact engine as Planetside 2. Both games don't try to cram as many people as Planetside 2 does into one area so they have less to worry about in terms of performance. Also, the chance of someone just up and killing you through a closed door is lessened in H1Z1 (fights are slower) and non-existant in Landmark (you can't die).

So why dont we have major lag problems and people getting 10-20 kills before the enemy can react when spawn / amp station shields go down?
Why arnt we constantly seeing bullets fly through shields as they are brought back online?

Use the same mechanic for the doors, have a shield. If the shield is blue, i as an NC can freely walk through just as normal shields work. If a TR wants in he has to press E (or whatever) to initiate the hack, a small timer of 5 seconds would then count down and the shield would drop.
Seems simple enough, could even have opaque shields or shields that change owner instead of dropping.