This year I’ll be presenting a new version of Networking for Physics Programmers as part of the physics tutorial day on Tuesday.
As for the material to be presented this year, it will differ significantly from prior years. I’m going for more advanced material this year so I’m not going to spend 5 minutes explaining UDP vs. TCP. We’ll be skipping that and going right to the interesting stuff which is:
1. How to develop your own custom network protocol in UDP. Reliability and acks, node / transport abstraction, how to structure your game protocol and serialize packets.
2. Overview of game networking models. Pure client/server, FPS networking model with client side prediction, deterministic lockstep, authority scheme. Examples of games using each technique. How each networking model works. Advantages and disadvantages. Understand the trade-offs so you can pick the best networking model for your situation.
3. Worked example: authority scheme for networked physics in a large streaming world. Same cube demo. Different networking strategy. This year I’ll be doing it dedicated client/server style instead of P2P and I’ll focus on all the practical details and tricks required to synchronize physics state in under 64kbit/sec such as: compression tricks for position, orientation and linear/angular velocity, how to prioritize object updates when you have too many objects to fit in one packet, using a reliability system and acks to avoid sending at rest objects over and over, lossy compression, quantization and other neat tricks.
Hope to see you Tuesday, March 1, in Room 3007, West Hall Moscone Center. I’ll be talking from 3:30PM- 4PM
Schedule details here.
UPDATE: Unfortunately the original material as presented above consistently took 2.5 hours during practice sessions. As a result, I’ve had to cut section 1 and 3. There is a lot of great info in section 2 and the feedback from practice sessions was consistently that it was the best section of the talk. If you’d like some information about #1 and #3 you can ask questions during Q&A, plus I’ll be available during GDC for impromptu meetings etc. where I can go over this info with a whiteboard or a notepad. DM me on twitter if you’d like to meet up: @gafferongames
{ 18 comments }
