Hacker News Reader

(2001) - Not some strange content collector, Gamasutra rebranded

Definitely worth a read. The deterministic simulation is easy to understand (though not to do), clever and allows for great networking performance.

Afaik this approach is still useful and used today (e.g. in fighting games).

View on HN

While lockstep is useful for some games, it was never really a good choice for fighting games due to the fast and timing sensitive nature. Rollback is an improvement over it that adds speculative execution for remote inputs, this is what should be the standard, although Japanese developers have only recently gotten on board with it.

I guess it depends on how high a level you're looking at it from. Both lockstep and rollback are variants of the general approach of "shared deterministic simulation" where you're mostly just sending inputs. ("Mostly" 'cuz on reconnect or desync or whatever you'll probably want to send full state.)

I really enjoyed this GDC talk on rollback networking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jb0FOcImdg&t=536s

(From 2019.)

One improvement is, to train a model on the player inputs and thus predict behavior. It takes some time, but if done right, the game after a while feels really "instantaneous" even when it comes to fast paced high-apm action.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com