> World of Warcraft (and now other games) The technique is much older than that in gaming. Client-side prediction was the big ticket feature for QuakeWorld in

> World of Warcraft (and now other games) The technique is much older than that in gaming. Client-side prediction was the big ticket feature for QuakeWorld in 1996, and Wikipedia says Duke Nukem 3D had it 10 months earlier. Dead reckoning, a more advanced variation on the same theme, goes back even further to early work on distributed military simulations. With dead reckoning, not only does the client extrapolate based on the last update from the server, but the server also tracks how far each client's predictions would be from the true state, so it knows how frequently to send updates to maintain a low enough error. That is, the server simulates the clients simulating the server. For anyone with a deeper interest in this topic, perhaps the best overview of the trickier issues with networked synchronization and prediction in modern games can be found in this presentation on Halo: Reach from last year's GDC: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014345/I-Shot-You-First-Networking http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014345/I-Shot-You-First-Networ...