Physics 🤬

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Yeah KZfaq ads don't pay much...unless you're getting millions of views per month it probably won't be more than some extra pocket change :P

The problem described in this video is not solved by any of the major (which I'm assuming is what you mean by "real") engines though. Moving platforms in multiplayer games are not even a fully solvable problem as long as there's significant latency-at least not in a generic, one-size-fits-all approach since every "solution" requires various tradeoffs that are acceptable (or not) depending on each individual game.

@@tomweiland ...its solved in unreal all of the problems described in the video... literally spend 5 minutes in the engine that soooo many ppl tell you to avoid and see just how easy it is.

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@@tomweiland i rest my case.

Uh oh :/

@@tomweiland I should have been more specific, I can't unzip because the file is not fully downloaded, and doesn't seems to ever be. Direct download link doesn't seems to work anymore, I can't figure this out. Any idea?

Have you taken a look at the pinned comment? That basically has all my suggestions for what you can try if the zip file doesn't extract.

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It's not playable, and I haven't worked on the project in months due to life getting busy. Even if I one day get it to a point where it's playable, releasing on mobile is unfortunately not high on my priority list.

Thank you for the kind words! These are the kind of comments which make me want to come back to this project, but I'm still trying to figure out where and in what capacity it fits into my life now that I work full time 😅

Agreed, I think what I may do (whenever I get back to working on this) is use proc gen to generate the shape as a starting point and then modify it by hand to fit exactly how I want it to look.

Yeah, something like that would be good 🤔

It's not inherently an architecture problem-the issue of how to deal with moving platforms (which is what my boat effectively is) in multiplayer is widely-recognized as a very common problem with no real solutions that work for all scenarios. I've never played WoW so I'm not familiar with how the zeppelins work, but depending on the restrictions you place on players while on board the problem can be very easy to solve. For example, simply restricting the player's ability to get on and off the platform/zeppelin to the times where it is not moving would allow you to just sync the player's relative position with no issues (as long as it only rotates around the Y axis). Another approach is to have clients predict the position of the platform so that it exists in the same "time stream" as their local player objects, but this will then cause problems with how players see other players interacting with said platform unless you predict other players' movement as well (which is tricky business since you don't have their inputs in real time). I will probably try the platform/boat prediction method in the future, but the point is that every approach to solving this issue has downsides and tradeoffs. Which of those you're willing to make depends heavily on the game and specific use case. Simply "doing everything in ticks" (I already am) or "in deltas" doesn't solve the issues that come with objects from different "time streams" interacting.

And I don't like it that way :P

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The problem with that is that it doesn't account for the discrepancies/delay in the boat's rotation, which would still lead to jittering/mispredictions an various situations. That's part of the reason why I went to the trouble of adding a "proxy" boat-it doesn't need to rotate so it just avoids that issue entirely.

Yes, interpolation would be able to hide most of the jitter in most circumstances.

That's great to hear! Things are going well, but unfortunately I haven't really figure out where and in what capacity this project fits into my life now that I work full time 😅

If I ever managed to release it (I'm currently not even actively working on the project), that would honestly be one of my last priorities. I also don't think it'd play super well with touch controls-you certainly wouldn't be able to compete with someone on mouse and keyboard.

One of the perks of working alone :P

@@tomweiland This video was a bit of relived trauma for me. I took a contract to develop a multiplayer game from scratch during COVID after working solo for several years. It proved to me once and for all I'm best suited to working alone - no boss and no employees. I think you really captured the problem and if this video had been around I would have asked the team to watch it for a second opinion. They were often skeptical of my explanations of the difficulty of achieving their requests.

I'm sorry to hear they didn't listen to you, that sucks!

I am someone who has a strong dislike for Roblox 😅 I think they're a company that frequently exploits children and their passion for making games, and I have zero interest in being locked into their development ecosystem or in dealing with their predatory payout/payment withdrawal system (it's basically a scam last I checked). Plus, I highly doubt that their multiplayer system would address the issues I was working through in this video.

That's true to an extent, but I've seen and talked to plenty of experienced devs who don't necessarily disagree with the programmer memes, still find them funny, and who will reference/repost them too :P

@@tomweiland Oh yeah, I mean, I still like them and they're still funny. I remember how it was, lol. I just don't really experience those problems as much myself anymore.

Maybe even 20%, 80% 😂

I don't really see the connection 🤔

@@tomweiland like they test whatever vulnerabilities you have in your game and if you fix them it will make your game better. maybe they will point out how games approach to its architecture is totally wrong. e.g. king of thieves game (where you build levels to defend your gold and complete others levels to rob them). devs approach a player verifying if their level is possible to pass by making a player to pass it themselves. and the way they handle it is they let the player complete a level offline (so no lag) and record the completion. so theres a huge insentive to cheat. and as it turns out you can record whatever completion, pass it as a legit one and its very difficult to check on the server side whether whatever arbitrary completion is legit. but can you really say that only cheaters are to blame that this exists and its not the consequence of devs design choices? so if you look at this that way you can interpret cheating as kinda like qa/pentesting/whatever process

Sure, having cheaters reveals exploitable vulnerabilities, but fixing said vulnerabilities is only necessary in the first place because people exist who will exploit them (aka the cheaters). Also, even if you consider something like aimbot to be exploiting a vulnerability (server trusts the client's rotation is legit), it's not really like there's much you can do about that. There's no way to verify or enforce that a client's mouse input-and by extension, player rotation-must come from a human controlling a mouse and not some third party software. Also, QA testers are trying to find issues which degrade the user experience so that you can fix them, while cheaters _actively degrade_ the user experience, so I really don't think the comparison makes sense. Even just as a player, I don't like cheaters. 99% of the time they don't have some noble intentions and either just don't care that they're ruining the experience for others, or they actually find joy in that fact. At the end of the day, the fact that people cheat slows down development (teams have to invest more resources into making things server authoritative) and is the reason many games require you to install invasive anti-cheat software. I'm not sure what's controversial about saying I don't like cheaters 😅

@@tomweiland yeah fair

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Makes sense-as long as it's not moving, you don't experience the effects of objects from different "time streams" interacting. Once it moves though, 💩 hits the fan :P

Hopefully one day, but at the moment the project is kind of on hold and I'm not quite sure when I'll get back to it :/

I haven't really paid much attention to Unity's Netcode for GameObjects development, but I'm assuming they have some kind of prediction/reconciliation functionality in there by now... But yeah, third parties are probably the way to go (unless you have the time and desire to write your own), but they don't usually have visual scripting support.

I'm assuming this is a joke lol, but just in case: I have not switched to Godot 😅 I'd like to come back to this project eventually, but I haven't really figured out where it fits in with work and other life stuff.

@@tomweiland Ya I was joking haha😅 Anyways looking forward to whatever comes next, I hope I can speak for a large part of the community if I say that you inspired a lot of us to strive for great projects. We will not forget your greatness. Good luck with anything you do🤞

The problem is that the client is simulating ahead of the server, so if you don't correct fully then your starting point for future tick is still incorrect and will lead to larger divergences more quickly. What you _can_ do is fully correct the player's collider/state, but add a bit of delay to the visual so you can smoothly interpolate to the new position.

Nope, I started working full time last year and haven't really touched this project in a while. I'd like to come back to it eventually, just not sure exactly when...

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I spent several months working on rebuilding the whole project and then started working full time. I'd like to come back to this eventually, just not sure exactly when...

Lmao did you click on my video expecting me to not say anything??

Well if it got a laugh out of you, that's a win :P

Yuh… time to go outside.

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You mean the scene with the water? That's from the game I was working on at the time 😅

Do it, just don't touch multiplayer for a while, _at least_ until you have a really solid grasp on the language, engine, and other tools you're using :P

Then just create a folder and name it "Materials"...? My project already had it because I started from the URP template project, but none of those assets are necessary for you to follow along (for example, which skybox you use is irrelevant). If you created your project using the built in render pipeline, you wouldn't have any of the template assets.

Ah that's much simpler :P

This heavily depends on what kind of game you're making. For something like a card game that doesn't need physics and can be easily represented by a few classes in your code, a console server would make more sense. However, if you need physics/collision detection, transforms, animations, etc. then running a Unity server is probably the better choice-otherwise you have to implement those things yourself, and if you don't know what you're doing you may very well end up with _worse_ performance. Another consideration is whether or not you care about preventing cheating, because if you don't you can just trust clients to calculate things on their end, and the server can be a console app which just relays data to the other clients. Or you can get rid of the dedicated server entirely and just have one of the clients also act as the server.

@@tomweiland I came to the same conclusion when I thought about it. But still, thank you for the answer!

I just take the grass and stone colors and blend them based on the angle of triangle. The steeper the slope, the more stone colored the triangle will be.

Walls would be sufficient to make it work, and it's something I considered but didn't implement yet because currently the water mesh is generated at runtime (and giving it walls would make that more complicated).

Yes, jitter needs to be accounted for and can cause further problems, but imo the main pain point/problem causer is just that latency exists at all. If I could pick between removing all jitter and removing latency so everyone's connection jitters between 0ms and 20ms or something, I'd choose the latter in a heartbeat :P

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I'm not really sure what you expect me to do about it, considering you've provided zero information about the problem other than that it exists lol 🤔

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I more-so fell into the "KZfaq trap" where making interesting videos somewhat requires things to look at least half-decent, even during development :P