Mana Shield orb display bug?

[Crystalion]

Could it also be...

By the way, do you happen to know how synchronization is done in D1?

Yes it could, but mostly it doesn't.

Yes, I do dimly recall quite a bit about D1, but I prefer to let more famous people like Jarulf suffer in order to educate others ;)

The bottom line is that GUI actions are translated to "commands" that are passed p2p and supposedly everything that really matters is then in sync on both (all 4, etc.) PCs, which a *lot* of the processing in a hopefully deterministic fashion (remember that this is a modem era game, so they weren't requiring LAN or broadband fat pipes so this all to "work", mostly).

The realtity of D1 is that much of the game in practice is out of sync, but many of the commands tend to pull things back into a semblance of agreement.

For example, "I saw soandso monster over there, but then you blasted it and its corpse is now at our feet... huh?".

The "best" desyncs in D1 were things like: "I'm on level 11"; "So am I"; "I don't see you!"; "I'm by the stairs!!"; "So am I, but I don't see you"... etc., when you could actually (buggily, of course) have both PCs "hosting" the level, so you actually had parallel universe dungeon level 11s in the same game.

In other words, a given PC "owned" a level, and had to give a bunch of state info describing it to a "new" PC that didn't know about the level as yet.

Blah, blah, blah, and so on and so forth.

Blizzard's genius was to realize that they hadn't done a good enough job with this technology to make it fly for D2 (where they wanted a lot more than 4 people to be able to play together). So they did a slight M.O. shift, and split the game into client/server even locally, for a single player.

So now there is only one true reality! Unfortunately, much of the time, the clients don't happen to know what that is. :D (i.e. now we often have client/server desync, where the server is always "right" and the client(s) *always* wrong, but before we had peer/peer desync which meant who's to say just what "reality" is?).