by Glenn Fiedler on March 11, 2010

Big thanks to everybody who attended the physics tutorial today. You guys had some excellent and very thoughtful questions at the end of the talk. I really enjoyed answering them – thanks for being a great audience!
UPDATE: I just uploaded the final versions of the slides with lots of extra notes + instructions for reproducing the demo sections. If you downloaded the previous versions then you should take another look!
Here are the final keynote slides for “Networking for Physics Programmers” with presenter notes: http://bit.ly/ckf1Xu
Here are the final PDF slides with notes sans superfluous visual effects: http://bit.ly/9CFzWb
Here is the demo shown in the talk: MacOSX 64bit Binary + Source, Win32 Binary
Have fun!
by Glenn Fiedler on January 24, 2010

For some bizarre reason I felt inspired to spend my one day off from work during crunch writing an article chronicling the development of modern game protocols. From RTS peer-to-peer lock step, to client/server, right up to FPS games and client-side prediction.
And I’m strangely enamored with the result, it flowed very well when writing it – and I believe it to be the best article I’ve written so far. It’s also the first article where I’ve felt compelled to include references to other people’s work instead of presenting just my own research.
What every programmer needs to know about game networking
You’re a programmer. Have you ever wondered how multiplayer games work?
From the outside it seems magical: two or more players sharing a consistent experience across the network like they actually exist together in the same virtual world. But as programmers we know the truth of what is actually going on underneath is quite different from what you see. It turns out that it’s all an illusion. A massive sleight-of-hand. What you perceive as a shared reality is only an approximation unique to your own point of view and place in time.