Great post. Not sure if I should reply to the whole thing.. (Fan Creations)

by Kahzgul, Tuesday, September 08, 2015, 22:29 (3367 days ago) @ uberfoop

Totally possible, except it's weird because the few setpiece animations that exist in the game do not effect the actual playspace in any meaningful way - they're just art animations in the background or in an area that you can't access. Given that, why not script them to run and animate locally? It doesn't really matter if they're not in perfect sync at all.

They definitely do animate locally at least. The server hosts just tell the gameplay host to do certain things, and if there's a de-sync they tell the next gameplay host to do things to correct any errors that happened in the migration.

At any rate, you're talking about a small subset of scripting; I was addressing the larger picture, including things that would be interactive.

Gotcha. Without knowing more about the back-end code it's hard for me to comment either way. All in all the lack of variance in missions is either due to a lack of creativity in the mission design/scripting team or a lack of options from the tools coders (or a combination thereof). Given how stuff like enemy spawns and the loot cave had to be hard-patched in order to be changed, my money is on the tools coders. I wonder if the tools were an afterthought and, instead of having a dedicated team, were made by backend or engine coders in their spare time? That would explain a lot.