[stcredzero]

With the way the world looks now, and the way it's shaping up to be in the future, we should be thinking about designing systems where there is no "now" but rather, there is instead a notion of "everything syncs soon." There can be a robust consensus reality in such a system, but it has to exist a short interval of time in the past.

I'm currently working on a multiplayer game design on these principles.

[nosuchthing]

Having played a multiplayer mobile game that uses a "everything syncs soon" protocol, and at the same time relies on the main mechanics of the game being timing the moves of characters against your opponents it often can lead to making the game highly unpredictable and jittery with "alternate timeline warps" when it resyncs, having nullified important moves.

[stcredzero]

Having played a multiplayer mobile game that uses a "everything syncs soon" protocol, and at the same time relies on the main mechanics of the game being timing the moves of characters against your opponents it often can lead to making the game highly unpredictable and jittery with "alternate timeline warps" when it resyncs, having nullified important moves.

Nope. Most designers pick a particular mechanic and try to make that exact mechanic work over the network. If you abandon the particular mechanic and aim on meta-goals, one of which might be no jitters, resyncs, and (visible) alternate timelines, then you can eliminate everything you just mentioned above.

[nosuchthing]

If you'd like to share I'd love to hear how you approach solving sync issues with multiplayer time sensitive games.

Starcraft/Warcraft RTS games seem to force every client in the same "room" to slow down if other clients report back bad/slow sync clocks, FPS games like CS/HL engine based will penalize single clients if they lag, and the worst I've seen was a mobile game by SNK which seems to rely on and give too much information to the client which has resulted in many users abusing such protocols.

[stcredzero]

I may do that in coming weeks if my current experiments work out.

[jchrisa]

If you want to let a mature open source sync system do the heavy lifting we've recently added Unity 3D support to Couchbase Lite. http://developer.couchbase.com/mobile/unity/

Hello world is a game where players drop shapes into a world and they automatically sync / appear on other devices.

Sorry about the plug -- great article Justin! I sent it to my team because I think it does a great job stepping back from the buzzwords and actually talking about the problems distributed databases have to confront.

[stcredzero]

Interesting. However I'm not just looking for syncing stats and inventory. What I'm talking about is designing a new game mechanic around the realities of distributed gaming, then designing a more robust server around that. The server will be finalizing entity positions, damage, and collisions a half second behind "real-time," and the game mechanic will be designed around this in a way that preserves player autonomy and immediate response. (Basically, deemphasizing aiming while emphasizing tactical dodging where the player seeks to minimize received damage over time.)

great job stepping back from the buzzwords

Those pesky buzzwords. You were just caught out being misled by one. (sync -- which typically means what you thought it did, but also has a generalized meaning)

[nosuchthing]

In competitive video games, if you give the client a large open window of freedom sooner or later you'll notice that window being used as a door by swaths of your userbase.

[stcredzero]

I thought long and hard about this. I would love it if there were tons of kamikaze tactics exploiting the additional half second of firing you have after you died. Maybe people could use this to defeat an otherwise powerful and untenable enemy.

Great!

That would mean groups of people were playing my game and cooperating to overcome huge odds in creative ways. (Players could use alts to do this, but there is already plans for a facility to let players build kamikaze drone ships without making an alt, and rigged to make this more economical.)

[marknadal]

@stcredzero I'm interested in building simulation systems for distributed systems, and trying to "gamify" them to teach people about these concepts in a tactile-playable way. Would you be interested in such work? It is less building a "entertainment" game and more an "educational" fun game. Shoot me an email: [e-mail]