[ENet-discuss] ENet package broadcasting

[Espen Overaae]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 8:41 AM, Boris <bstih at zootfly.com> wrote:
>
> Hellow again, thank you for such quick reply...
>
> Please elaborate your first statement.
>
>> / Because of our fixed time step, we wait every client to send its input
>> to
>
> />/ every one. When data arrives, we update next frame.
> /
> that is a bad idea,
>
> Why do you think this is a bad idea, do you have any other idea. I know that
> our idea is not cheat safe. But we see only this, as a major problem in our
> idea. And ofcoarse our code is for LAN only. Internet is another story.

For LAN it's ok, it makes things simpler and you usually have very low
ping values on a LAN, but it's a bad idea because you can't use it on
the internet. Also, if your LAN is either wireless or crowded, packet
loss could occur, causing delays.

You mentioned Halo, so I assume this is an FPS game or at least a fast
action game (as opposed to turn-based strategy game). The alternative
I suggest is to use a fixed timestep on the server and the clients,
but not demand everything be fully synchronized before incrementing
the time. This introduces a lot of new challenges in regards to
consistency. The site Erik Beran links to in another email talks about
this, and there are a lot of other resources about this on the web.
It's not my field, but I believe John Carmack has written some good
stuff about this, he wrote most of the engines for the Doom and Quake
games, and pioneered multiplayer FPS games.


Espen Overaae