Comment by Splizard
5 years ago
No, peer2peer lockstep is the future. No central server, no speed penalty. No storage penalty.
Has been used in RTS games to synchronize 1000s of units across low-bandwidth connections.
Input may be delayed by latency which can be mitigated with client-side prediction. Cosmic bit-shifts & indeterminism can be a challenge in longer sessions but peers can sync with eachother when there is an OOS.
Usually in games you have some sort of mechanism for determining what is the 'truth' in terms of game state. I agree that if everyone is online while editing or only briefly offline then what you suggest would probably be much better. If someone was offline for long periods of time and made extensive edits they would essentially have to be discarded.
I think in practice what you would do (if your use case allowed it) is use CRDTs, but periodically checkpoint and trim them when you know everyone has synced. That gives you very similar properties to the video game world and still has the features of not losing peoples edits when they make them offline.
Do you have links that would tell me more about peer2peer lockstep?
As the parent commenter mentioned, this technique comes from RTS games, so you could start here: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131503/1500_archers_o...
much thanks