4 ms·

This is a deep topic, and people write entire thesis papers on this topic. This is/was a major performance issue in Star Citizen for years. Because cheating te

This is a deep topic, and people write entire thesis papers on this topic. This is/was a major performance issue in Star Citizen for years. Because cheating tends to be an outlier activity, some companies choose to invest more in identifying cheaters after the fact using pattern recognition and machine learning tools rather than outright prevention. Depends on if your game inherently resets between game loops (i.e. battle royale, deathmatch, MOBA, etc), or if you have a continuous persistent state that has to be kept stable (i.e. MMORPG). Full security means validating every activity with a fully trusted server before broadcasting to other players. Full performance basically means full client trust, whatever the implementation ends up looking like. There's a whole spectrum of solutions somewhere in the middle for most games.

henrikschroder 6y ago
It also completely depends on what kind of multiplayer game it is. If you're doing a simple turn-based card game, obviously you can run the entire game on the server, and have the clients just do input and display of the game state. If you're doing a fast-paced first-person-shooter, you need to run more logic on each game client and trust them more. Add a real-time physics engine and it gets even trickier, because now you need to make sure it's deterministic regardless of client hardware. If you can solve the latter problem in a general way, you can easily build a company around it. There's already a bunch that do nothing but this. It's just a fundamentally hard problem because the speed of light is what it is, the distribution of computing hardware is what it is, and the distribution of players is what it is.