What is the current state-of-the-art to network real-time strategy games?
I seem to recall that a few years ago, some AAA titles only transmitted the player inputs (Starcraft 1, Age of Empires). Since this requires you to keep everything else totally deterministic, is this still a viable option? Synchronizing random number generators seems feasible, but what about subtle differences in FPU implementations etc..?
Or are strategy games using something closer to action-game networking, where individual entities are transmitted instead (with some form of prediction and (delta) compression)?
If so, how are volatile items like projectiles treated?
What about client/server versus peer-to-peer? I'm guessing that all this is strongly interrelated.
Thank you for your time!
Answer
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3094/1500_archers_on_a_288_network_.php This is still how networking is done in RTS games. P2P is also the normal way of handling connections. Using a lock timestep model however results in the irritating case of desync and cheating handling. There is good way of recovering when a desync happens and all RTS games simply says "Quit the match". Bug tracing desync errors is also a nightmare.
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