AVWW Beta 0.545, "Multiplayer Public Alpha (Opt-In)," Released!

[superking]

Yeah, this is a forgiving community, but I dont think the current form taken by the multiplayer (no sync between monster locations & projectiles) is going to cut it elsewhere in 2012.  I suspect reviewers will bloody AVWW's nose for lazy execution if it is not improved; not that I know anything about programming, but from a consumers perspective it will be perceived as third rate given that so many other games do it better. I cant imagine co-oping through halo with the monsters and projectiles having different positions on every players screen and monsters randomly dying because they were reduced to 0% HP on someone elses game- and I cant imagine many gamers tolerating it.

[Toll]

Well, they are discussing changing it so it's at least semi-synced (i.e. server giving the local client the movement path of the monsters, and the clients dealing with it as it does right now). I believe that'd mean that even though the monster wouldn't necessarily be at the exact same location on all clients, it'd at least be close to identical (so no more cases of the same monster being in two corners of a chunk at the same time). Look back in this thread to see what Keith said about it, but I believe that was the basic idea of it.

[x4000]

Thanks for all the thoughts, everyone.  Here's my notes on what's coming next: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9554.0.html

[x4000]

New one: http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,9555.0.html

[Mánagarmr]

Someone up here mentioned Terraria, and Terraria is pulling its own problems as far as multiplayer goes. In any case where there is a high lag you'll have monsters "popping" around, which is honestly not such a bad thing, since they do this for ALL characters in play. But it does make certain skillshots difficult, especially in very high lag situations (200ms+) where monsters can entirely bypass you if you hit them in melee.

Thank you for clarifying that, I've only played the very beginning parts of Terraria and wasn't sure if they were really managing all that massive laser pew-pew in MP with none of the restrictions we've seen elsewhere.  So they haven't defeated physics after all   They go for lag-compensation rather than local-sim-of-monsters, so you can miss stuff that you would have hit if you were playing singleplayer, etc.  Not arguing that that is worse than what we have, just observing.

One thing about the "server-plots-a-course" approach is that I _think_ we can maintain the local-sim-of-monsters for the actual firing of their projectiles and the collision check for your projectiles so that we can still avoid missing when you wouldn't have missed in SP and getting hit when you wouldn't have gotten hit in SP.  The thing is that the enemies would still be in _slightly_ different positions between the various clients, but it would probably be close enough that you wouldn't notice except through deliberate scrutiny.

The downside is that it's not compatible with some of the behaviors of our current monsters like bats making split-second direction changes to chase a rapidly moving player.  I'm not sure, but my recollection of Terraria doesn't include anything like that: the slimes and underground-worms had fairly large delays between hops, the zombies would chase you but still had fairly relaxed changes in acceleration, etc.

Do note that if you attack a monster in melee and it "pops" to a new location behind you, you DO hit it. The client reports a hit, and server says "OK, you hit it. But it is actually over there" and updates the position after the hit. That way, you don't flail helplessly in the air even during high lag, which in my eyes is everything above 200ms. You hit it, the server updates the monsters position and you reaim. It's surprisingly easy to work with, once you realize that it's a matter of network lag. The multiverse thing would for all intents and purposes be seen as a major desync bug. But now I'm off to read Chris' update