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Yes but lets acknowledge that it's not really a game, and that nobody should do this for any kind of public game with winners and losers. A multiplayer server

Yes but lets acknowledge that it's not really a game, and that nobody should do this for any kind of public game with winners and losers. A multiplayer server needs to run the simulation for every player and be the authority, the clients should simply collect input from the player and run a "lite" simulation to hide latency.

JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
No, not every multiplayer game needs an authoritive server. It depends largely where your priorities are. For myself, having a base of players with some cheaters would be a great problem to have.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  Yeah but, the solution to your great problem is to write the authoritative server, so I would recommend you just do that in the first place. It's not really any extra work if you are starting a new project. (An authoritative server is just a headless client after all :) )
setr 5y ago
RTS games typically run deterministic simulations locally, and only sync inputs, with no real need for an authority. The anti-cheat mechanism is simply the fact that simulation state has to stay in sync, and artificial changes would trivially desync. Of course, this leads to the standard RTS cheat — map hacking — because the client has to have everything by definition. But you have enough entities in an RTS that syncing full state, or even delta, gets ridiculous quickly, so it’s just something that has to be dealt with. Fighting games also tend to do something similar — deterministic lockstep with rollback — which also sensibly runs with no authority (again, you can’t teleport/wallhack because you’re only passing player inputs, and moving just your character is the same as the sim desyncing) But my main point is that an authoritative server is not a guaranteed architecture for multiplayer games — the game design should definitely factor in (as it does in OP’s case).

JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago

No, not every multiplayer game needs an authoritive server. It depends largely where your priorities are. For myself, having a base of players with some cheaters would be a great problem to have.

jay_kyburz 5y ago
Yeah but, the solution to your great problem is to write the authoritative server, so I would recommend you just do that in the first place. It's not really any extra work if you are starting a new project. (An authoritative server is just a headless client after all :) )

setr 5y ago

RTS games typically run deterministic simulations locally, and only sync inputs, with no real need for an authority. The anti-cheat mechanism is simply the fact that simulation state has to stay in sync, and artificial changes would trivially desync. Of course, this leads to the standard RTS cheat — map hacking — because the client has to have everything by definition. But you have enough entities in an RTS that syncing full state, or even delta, gets ridiculous quickly, so it’s just something that has to be dealt with. Fighting games also tend to do something similar — deterministic lockstep with rollback — which also sensibly runs with no authority (again, you can’t teleport/wallhack because you’re only passing player inputs, and moving just your character is the same as the sim desyncing) But my main point is that an authoritative server is not a guaranteed architecture for multiplayer games — the game design should definitely factor in (as it does in OP’s case).