Re: [GD-General] physics and networking

[Cruise <cr...@ca...>]

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> I have a few questions for all of you. I would be grateful to hear from
> all your varied experience.
[snip]
> Do you think an entire "simple death match" MP game can get away with it
> being peer to peer?
Depends on how many players your game will have. The current
multiplayer trend, especially with the rise in team based multiplayer,
is getting as many people into a match as possible. An upper limit of
64 players is not uncommon now. That's clearly unworkable in a full
peer-to-peer system except on a LAN.

> What kind of things must you always arbitrate by a server? Can one
> "design" the game play out of any necessary server arbitration?

> It would save a lot of data structure bookkeeping if each client can
> become more powerful (and the server to arbitrate almost nothing, or
> just not exist at all).
Though that would be lovely from a bandwidth and latency point of
view, it's just not practical in real terms. The more authority the
client has, the more potential there is for someone to abuse it.

The lesson from Half-Life is that if your game has any decent number
of players, then some of those players will be cheating. And they'll
be damn ingenious cheats too.

The simple matter is that you can't trust client software anymore. You
have to have an authoritative state-of-play machine.

> The bookkeeping isn't bad for simple player position, rotation, etc. But
> chains of complex physics reaction becomes quite a pain of the neck to
> be maintained and received from a "remote" arbitrator all the time. :(
> It easily "doubles" the code to type to have the server minds itself
> with so many complex collisions arbitrations. :(

Agreed. It is a shame. But the enviroment in which the code is
deployed makes it necessary.

[ cruise / www.casual-tempest.net / www.transference.org ]

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