Vote: AC Protocol Compatibility

[Victor]

I'm redoing ACR with AC 1.2.0.2 as the AC base version. Should I take more time to make it compatible with AC?

Client compatibility: ACR clients can play on AC servers. (probably not worth it on its own)
Server compatibility: AC clients can connect and play on ACR servers.

There are two choices:

• Skip AC compatibility and ACR 2.7 comes out faster, or
  
• Wait longer and have AC compatibility
  

This is suggested by issues #41 and #42.

The rationale for this feature is that sometimes, there is "no server to play with", so this would reduce boredom as ACR players can still play on AC servers, and the servers would advertise ACR to AC players.

Clearly, AC would probably ban ACR servers from their master-server.

[dm.mossberg590a1]

1. AC won't let ACR clients go on AC servers and
2. AC won't allow ACR servers in their master-server list so might as well have AC players download ACR.
3. If ACR servers have to accommodate AC clients every time we change the speed of various guns, the speed will also have to be changed in the corresponding AC client code otherwise ACR will detect a speedhack. Also a lot of AC players will be frustrated because it will be very difficult for them to play effectively without iron sights.
4. Supporting another client is a security problem in itself but if the owners of that client also hate us? Seems to me like a recipe for problems.

Seems to me that AC and ACR compatibility can only effectively happen if AC and ACR are on good enough terms to work toward making both our clients compatible. Even then such a thing might not be worthwhile due to the higher cost of maintaining such a thing without compromising both our clients/servers. In the end AC and ACR are different games and should be treated as such.

It could be possible to make it easier to download for AC players by having a custom AC installation package where it copies the AC files from the specified AC directory then downloads the ACR specific files to make the download even easier. However, ACR is only like 60 something megabytes so its kind of useless to do something like that.

[Victor]

1. ACR can maintain most client behaviour so that servers cannot detect whether it is an AC or ACR client.
   
2. Yep, they'll say that the gameplay is modded and ban ACR servers
   
3. Actually, we'd have to speed up ACR clients, which would make it unfair for AC clients, and thus give them an incentive to switch to ACR
   
4. How it would work is that the ACR server would send an extension message to the client, and in AC, it would be ignored. In ACR, it would complete a handshake and enable "ACR enhancements".
   

But like you said, this idea would probably be bad, as AC would just ban all ACR servers on their master-server, but then how about client compatibility? I guess we wouldn't want to spend difficult efforts to support AC if they'll oppose us.

[dm.mossberg590a1]

Client compatibility could possibly work if the ACR client only loads the core AC files (the models and weapons for AC are actually in ACR I think). So ACR already has the capability for being an AC client as long as the speeds and various other things are set to be exactly like in AC (to prevent being called "hackers").

I don't see why any ACR player would want to play on AC and definitely AC won't like us trying to play on their servers. They will probably spend a really long time trying to find us and kick us out and if they can't find a way to identify if a player is playing from ACR it might become a witch hunt where they ban all ACR usernames or ACR members from playing at all. That would be bad for people who play both games.

[Victor]

The ACR client would be able to detect if the server supports "ACR extensions", so it could maintain the same speed and disallow aiming down sights.

It would be very similar to the legal AC mods (killfeed, Protox interface mods, etc.) Since there would be little (/fullbright is always enabled) to no advantage in gameplay, I don't think AC would care.

However, I don't think this idea would be worth the effort, so I voted no.

[-{ET}-xdEpicZombie]

I think votes are showing that we don't want it to happen.After all theres plenty of things to do with the time!

[Victor]

I guess development will continue without considering AC support.