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In this developer diary, meet the God of War: Ascension multiplayer team and learn about some of our lag hiding tricks 
The open beta is live on Playstation Plus now, so hop on and try it out!
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After 4 years of hard work we are now in the open beta phase of God of War: Ascension
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I’ve had the distinct honor of working with SuperBot Entertainment over the last 2 years helping them out with netcode. Finally their game is released!
Congratulations SuperBot!
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Regular readers of this blog know that I started work at Sony after leaving Pandemic. But what have I been working on? Until now this has been a secret…
I’m proud to be finally be able to talk about what I do at work.
I’m the Lead Network Programmer on God of War: Ascension!
I can’t wait until you guys get to play this online. There are so many cool lag hiding techniques that we have developed just for this title, completely new stuff! Never been done before! I wish I could talk about more but it will have to wait until after we are shipped.
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To my friends at That Game Company: It has been a pleasure working with you over the past few years, sharing some low-level network code with you and brainstorming over networking techniques and strategies. These times were a highlight of my time at Sony so far.
Congratulations!
Your game is an amazing acheivement and I’m a huge fan.
I’m so proud that I was able to play a small part helping you make your game.
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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
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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!
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