Latency, Authoritative Server, Lag Compensation, Course Correction, Packet Drops and Client Side Prediction. These are things you would worry about when attempting to build a MMO game. For companies where the delay matters these logics are a must. This post is on setting up an Authoritative Server. There are different ways of setting up the authoritative server. Some of them is mentioned here. You have N clients and one client acts as the authoritative server: Imagine N clients with different machine configurations. The server would need to decide the best possible machine and have the physics simulation run in that. We then have issues with client disconnecting in which case we need to swap the authoritative client to another machine. This means we have to maintain all the state the game was in and move it to the new authoritative client. In an online environment this is simple nothing but nonsense. There is a dedicated server which simulates everything including physics and ...
I needed a good interpolation system for my cars in the mmo world. I tried a few in the internet but nothing served its purpose. The logic used server time and current network time to figure out how old the packets were to based on which it would interpolate or extrapolate or simply snap. For most part the logic worked fine and so I don't blame all the wonderful articles I found in the internet. The problem I had was lag, frequent snapping, and sometimes slow and quick acceleration of the car. There wasn't a smooth movement. It would move smooth as long as the packets arrived fine and once they delay it would begin doing all crazy things. After dumping all logs it was evident that the problem was with the packets arriving very late. This is because over the wire through UDP there were lots of packets being dropped. This means on a high speed racing game where I collect and do a lot of things I definitely have a great deal of this loss and this magnifies where there are mo...
I have been wanting to move from our custom logging process to an analytics tool specific to gaming for quiet sometime now. The main reason being maintenance and interpretation of the data. After some research looks like Playtomic is the only game analytics tool that gives more than you can ask for. I played around with other tools but nothing so interesting. Lumos for example is new and has a long way to go and most of them use google analytics to get their job done. What we need was much more than that. Heatmaps supported by Playtomic is simply awesome. Who would not want it. I am surprised nobody else thought of it; maybe because it seemed more of an overhead than a good feature to have. Unfortunately it also looks like Playtomic is dangling right now. It claims to be recording several billion events a day and for that amount and the price I wonder how they are able to sustain. A good product like this should never end. I hope they continue their support and I hope they ...
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