alt Hacker NewsHave you considered the opportunity of using delta compression on snapshots? Like the internal state of the physics simulation, most of the gamestate itself don't change between frames. Using delta compression on the whole structure is doable.
Have you considered the opportunity of using delta compression on snapshots? Like the internal state of the physics simulation, most of the gamestate itself don't change between frames. Using delta compression on the whole structure is doable.
The thing the author is trying to solve for here is reducing the amount of CPU used on the client when it rolls back the simulation and re-simulates to keep server authority.
He does this by only rolling back and re-simulating only a subset of the world, greatly reducing the amount of CPU required. It's cool that he's approaching this from the point of view of adding support for it in the physics engine itself, vs. making it something that the game has to do themselves.
Delta compression is an unrelated technique which reduce the amount of bandwidth sent from server to client, by sending only the differences between the snapshot at baseline frame n and the current snapshot frame m on the server.
Just want to clear this up for anybody trying to follow along. Bringing in delta compression is an unrelated thing (but somewhat similar conceptually). It might confuse people to talk about these things at the same time, if they're really just trying to understand what the author is doing in the article.
cheers
- Glenn