Desync widget

New chat is not showing desyncs by default, which is fine. But, there should be widget popup showing player that he was desynced, it should not be hard to implement and would save/add some troubles.

Doesn't Desync = !Exit because the game is fucked and there is no way to fix it?

You dont get it, some players dont know what desync means. When they desync, there should be one time pop up telling them what is going on and how can they solve it.


Otherwise, they will just keep wondering why is noone mooving and units are stockpiling.

https://github.com/ZeroK-RTS/Zero-K/issues/201

what happened to poor nubtron? is it forgotton?

quote: Since the new chat was added I frequently see people not reacting to imprortant messages, such us when game speed was set to 0.7, or a player left, and on top of that the desyncs. When in one game I realized I missed a such a message I immediately disabled the new chat and turned back the old one. Now that I can see all the messages again, while some players don't, I see how much harm the new chat does, where people don't react to game speed accidentally set to 0.7 unless you tell them as spec, or don't realize when a player has dropped.

List of stuff that is not filtered by new console needs to be extended.

Wtf is that metal bar?

quote: Desyncs are probably best served by a separate window popping up to tell the player.

Please! No intrusive popups! Its one thing when the desync is in chat where its not taking up more space in the UI.. but its another to have it pop up suddenly on your screen, inhibiting your ability to command units / observe. Imagine playing a game, ordering your glaives around to shoot enemy mexes / whatever in a micro intensive battle. Suddenly a wild popup appears! Its blocking your ability to see what's going on / order units around! It was annoying enough in supreme commander and was one of the features I loved about Spring compared to supcom (next to the handling of latency). Don't take this away!

what I don't get is why there's no state stored somewhere that can be "flashed" onto each connected client if one of them is misbehaving

I think you are confusing some things here, Shadowfury333.

Spring is not peer-to-peer (so no quadratic scaling of network connections) because every packet is sent from one client to the spring host and then from the host to all clients. The spring server still doesn't run the simulation and so has no clue what's going on until a client says "I won!", so similarly all clients are equally "right" due to a lack of a canonical state.
(I apologize for calling everything "spring server" and "spring host" even if there's special names for them).

Spring uses synced simulation. In video encoding terms, that's basically purely P frames.
Since transferring the full game state after every action is infeasible for virtually any real time multiplayer game (you can probably get away with it in turn based games like chess), almost every contemporary multiplayer game relies on synced simulation to a certain extent, although most newer games include having certain states transmitted for replay (and anti-desync) purposes. Examples include SC2, DotA 2, Path of Exile and many more.
In video encoding terms, that's what I frames are used for.

Running synced simulations in a peer-to-peer environment sounds like hell to me. If you have a server, then all packets are distributed in a defined order (and are thus received by the clients in a set order). Not sure how P2P would handle that.
(Note that this implies that each client is only allowed to execute actions after the host has received the respective packet and returned it, which means that the game can feel "stiff" to control if your latency is higher. Client prediction is a common technique to work around this).


My point is, P2P or dedicated hosting are not directly related to how you run your simulation of the game. But spring does not use P2P, and thus P2P is not the reason for desyncs.

Basically, you can run synced simulations with or without the server also running the simulation (I reckon TF2 hosts would run a simulation of their own, but I'm not sure). Spring (and e.g. Warcraft 3) doesn't, so desync is an issue (and replays can only play forward).

Do you have an example of a game that uses P2P hosting? I'd be interested to learn about how to maintain consistency in that...