Ryan "Ridah" Feltrin, one-time programmer at Xatrix, the recently-closed company that created Kingpin: Life of Crime, updated his .plan describing what's up with the network code for the game, and the timing of the release of the SDK and its subsquent updates, which he frankly describes as having left Kingpin in a state of disarray. Here's the story:

I would like to take some time to explain a few things regarding some comments I've recently read on the Shack boards.

First, regarding the status of the Kingpin netcode.

This is something I have looked at several times, after hearing some negative feedback from a few users. Each time I've looked into it, I have failed to find any hard evidence of network code inefficiencies.

I did spend a fair chunk of time cutting network traffic both during and after the completion of Kingpin. I introduced more delta compression in the entity packet stream, moved chunks of server code over to the client, and removed single-player legacy fields that were not important to multiplayer gaming.

This does not equate to better network code, but it does at least suggest that we made an effort to make things better, even if the end result is that the network conditions will eventually decide whether the game is playable or not.

There is no action game made to date, that can seemlessly counter an unreliable or lack of network bandwidth between you and the server.

My advice is to look for a server with a consistent ping in your server browser. If a dozen pings return a wide range of times, it's probably not a very reliable server, and will likely result in higher packet-loss.

Another thing to keep in mind, as that a higher percentage of win32 servers are likely to be sitting on a cable or DSL link (read: unpredictable) than are linux servers, which often sit on T1 or OC-x level connections (read: reliable).

Unfortunately, Kingpin has a high percentage of servers running on win32, which increases the chances of players ending up on unreliable servers, due to the typical links these machines are behind, and the likelyhood that they are used for more than just a Kingpin server.

Secondly, the timing of the Kingpin SDK might not have been ideal, but given the release schedule of the binary patches, it just didn't make sense to put out the SDK until the game was all patched up. Unfortunately I was unable to compile the 1.21 release for Linux at the time of release, so that was left at v1.2, and the v1.21 SDK was released only with win32 components.

This has left Kingpin in a state of dissarry.

Several changes have occured since the v1.21 release, which means I am not in the position to make statements regarding any future releases, since Kingpin is now officially the property of a company I no longer work for. All I can say, is that I will do the best I can to alleviate the situation.