[ODE] Re: ODE on multiplayer games

[Henrik Grimm]

James Arthur wrote:
> You could do it another way with a client-server method. Get the
> clients to send events to a central server and the server periodically
> sends object state data back to clients. Unless you're on a very fast
> local network with a very fast server you'll need the clients to do
> some simulation work themselves between updates from the server, but
> on receiving an event from the server the client's state is
> overwritten. Since the client gets updated periodically you can get
> away with having a faster-but-less-accurate simulation on the client.
> 

I see this as one case of the second paradigm mentioned. The owner of a 
specific entity can be any node and the node that controls an entity may 
not be the owner (and thus has to send events to the owner). In many 
games, a server is the owner of all entities (for cheat prevention and 
simplicity). The general idea is that you have one owner of an entity 
but many nodes may be interested in the entity and thus keeps surrogates 
of it. This works both in a client/server or a P2P architecture.

It also has some interesting problem in e.g. FPS-games where aiming is 
very important. If a player aims perfectly at another player and fires, 
he expects it to be a hit. But the position he aims at may not be were 
the player really is.

/Henrik