Comment by stephc_int13
16 hours ago
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.
I was also curious about this, and I don't think the other replies understood what was being suggested.
If I understood correctly, the aim of the engine is to lower the in-memory size of the history of game states, by only snapshotting the delta. I'm also curious what would happen if, instead, you'd just run any deterministic snapshottable physics engine, and delta compressed the history on the fly. I think this is how, for example, Braid works.
Might be that it doesn't work, that running the delta check on two big enough snapshots would be too slow, and that's what this engine fixes. But would love to hear if it was considered.
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
No, in this context I meant delta-compression in the case of local roll-back.
The entire gamestate has to be rolled back when using this style of netcode, regardless of bandwidth, reducing the size of snapshots in memory can also reduce make it faster to rebuild.
Actually, it doesn’t roll back the entire game state. Everything is stored in slot maps, and if there are 1000 slots and only 10 changed, it really does only rollback those 10 only and it does not touch anything else. Slot maps are great!
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Yes thank you, you understand perfectly and thank you for explaining. Also, I LOVE your series of blog posts, thank you for making them!
Just to add to the general discussion for everyone following along - rollback netcode only sends inputs around, not state, so it doesn't really have much to send. I think I'm doing about 1.5 KB per second. When you point your mouse it sends that data in 10 bytes. There's not a lot to delta compress.
One cool trick you could try (although you are probably doing it already) is to include all inputs for some long period (like 1-2 seconds!) in every input packet the client sends to the server.
This way if one input packet gets lost, the very next one getting through will have all the inputs for the last 1-2 seconds, and this greatly improves how well your game will play under packet loss.
When you do this, you can even do an encoding from left -> right for all inputs, and actually, sort of delta encode inputs within the packet! Inputs don't change that much, so you can even get smart with the encoding and optimize it down to basically nothing.
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