Howdy y'all! Welcome back for a second Developer Update. This week, we’re looking into the world of networking, improvements made in Totally Reliable Delivery service, and the tools our team used to get us there.
Summary
Making online games is hard. Making a ragdoll game in an open world work online across 5 different platforms is even harder. Since our initial release on April 1st, 2020, we’ve made a lot of improvements to our networking system to improve the player’s experience.
While working on these optimizations and updates, our highest priorities are:
- High accuracy for positions and rotations of every physics based object in the game portrayed (including all of the character’s joints and limbs!). This is so the player isn’t rendering 100 ft away from the rocket they’re supposed to be flying!
- Fastest possible reaction time for clients.
- Lowest amount of network traffic between players in any given server to maintain stability.
- Making sure all network objects have a very smooth movement.
Here is a bit of a deeper dive into some of the things we did to make Totally Reliable Delivery Service’s online functionality even better.
Photon Unity Networking
- Photon is a Unity based tool to help our code sync between all our users.
- Photon defaults to sending a full byte when you need to sync a boolean. With NetStack, every bit in one byte can be sent with a different boolean.
- NetStack’s method allows for 800% more information with the same amount of data! That’s a lotta bytes!
Interpolation Improvements
- While playing online, clients data is in a constant struggle between the server and player perception.
- Interpolation also smooths out lag and lost data errors on the network by projecting where a player will be in accordance to their current movement/position, and seeks to bridge the gap between what the player experiences vs. what the network reads.
- In the example below, our original game was using TRDS Lerp Clamped. After the update, we’ve gone with a Lerp + Lerp, which opts for a network solution that balances smoothing out the experience for the players the best. Totally Reliable Network Solutions!
Compressing Network Data
- The amount of data we were able to compress utilizing these network optimizations resulted in an average of 50% less data needed to be sent. Woot!
- In order to keep all the players, vehicles, and objects in order all of this data has to be continuously sent to retain a totally reliable network synchronization. The less data we have to send, the easier the network can transmit back to players their positioning/actions.
This is a very brief summary of our second installment of updates coming your way. Stay tuned next week for even MORE coming your way, and remember to toss Totally Reliable Delivery Services on your Steam wishlist!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1011670/Totally_Reliable_Delivery_Service/