This isn't an uncommon strategy today. Many online RTS games work in a synchronized model like this still; it's much cheaper to for all players to send each oth

This isn't an uncommon strategy today. Many online RTS games work in a synchronized model like this still; it's much cheaper to for all players to send each other their inputs than for the server to send the positions of possibly thousands of characters constantly. The recent Halo games use a synchronized network model only in their cooperative modes. (It's obvious because lag will cause the game to slow down.) >It does make me think that cheats (not that I ever cheated) were missing a trick. If they knew what the next number to be pulled from the random number generator was, they could, for example, delay firing a weapon by a frame or two, to get more damage. Probably other more interesting things I can't think of immediately. If there was ever a bot vs bot Doom competition, this is something you'd definitely want to consider. See http://taeb-nethack.blogspot.com/2009/03/predicting-and-controlling-nethacks.html http://taeb-nethack.blogspot.com/2009/03/predicting-and-cont... for an example of that sort of thing done in Nethack!