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This allowed them to design what from their world simulation required network components, as not everything requires a network component. “Many of our possible network problems were already addressed in the single player because of the design of our game,” said Heckinger.īecause of their sophisticated level-of-detail and spatial relevancy systems, the team was able to determine for multiplayer what mattered for the simulation or directly affected the players immediate gameplay area. Soaring Pixel Games was able to accomplish this because of the way they designed their game architecture for single player. The players are trusted client authorities and multiplayer games are set up where ownership of the total world is shared across multiple players.

With a large world, a lot of what has to be activated from their multiple systems depends on where players are on the map. We're more interested in people having fun and if that means they want to cheat a little bit, it's their game, so they can go right ahead,” added Heckinger. “We're not worried about competitive play per se, you know we'll deal with that in the future if the game does well. This allows them more flexibility when it comes to the other factors, such as who can be authoritative in managing the synchronization of the simulation.

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If they need more precision, their systems increase precision with increased update rates.īecause the game is designed to be cooperative, Heckinger said cheat mitigation isn’t currently a priority for them. Oftentimes, rotation values don't even matter for their simulation operations. Many of the game’s systems only need to know generally where something in the world is for their heuristics since lazy evaluation allows them to quickly identify what needs updating which is relevant to an event or player action. For Soaring Pixel Games, not only was this useful for optimizing better performance for players in single player, it also allows them to more easily distribute their simulation and authority across players in multiplayer.īreakwaters uses a pseudo-deterministic custom physics engine built on top of PhysX, and the team decided to lock determinism to a certain degree of precision. Simulation, rendering, and artificial intelligence are all handled by systems that are separately activated. They make use of spatial relevancy and distance-based activation for single player, and were able to extend these systems for multiplayer. In order to maintain smooth gameplay and have low load times for single player, Soaring Pixels Games architected their game to separate simulation between different layers of abstraction. Soaring Pixels is exploring increasing the amount of players per session depending on how enjoyable people find it.īreakwaters is an ambitious game that has a demanding water simulation system. The game features an online cooperative mode where friends can work together to explore the waves and defeat titans in groups of four connected players at a time. So how do you know what is the right model for your game? We spoke with Phillip Heckinger, owner of Soaring Pixels Games, to understand how they approached networking for their upcoming small-scale cooperative title. They did this to accommodate for the estimated demand and total player scale projected for the game’s launch. For example, Team17, the studio behind Overcooked!, initially used a peer-to-peer model but changed during development to use dedicated servers instead. It’s important to keep in mind that some small-scale, cooperative games have different needs than others.

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Read more about how we decided how to create the sample game given these factors in this blog.

Lock-in: We want to be able to evolve the sample someday to show how it would like being run with dedicated servers.

Cheat mitigation: As we’re focusing on cooperative concepts, cheating is not a concern as there is no explicit player gain from it.

Complexity: Need low complexity to be able to educate multiplayer development principles on to new developers.

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Cost: Free to create and maintain, low cost for relay service used during live ops.

Precision: Moderate due to the casual combat mechanics.

Synchronized simulation scale: All player and AI transforms, animations, and activity.

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Players per session: Goal of 10 given a client-host running on a modern PC.Latency: Up to 200ms of latency would be acceptable (including relay service hops).We assessed the factors for Boss Room below: With the sample game, Boss Room, we have the ideal example: It’s small scale in player and simulation and is a cooperative and client hosted game.