[ODE] Client prediction and asynchronous simulation

[Eric Lasota]

Nick Winters wrote:
> Uhh, you're running client and server physics at different timesteps?
It's based on Quake 3, which has that setting by default.  I could make 
them run at the same timestep if that compromises stability by itself, 
they'll still need to run out of sync though.  The server will process 
client movement packets as it receives them for the most part, which 
means a client that gets backed up will have no movement for several 
world frames, followed several updates within a single frame.
> 1) ODE needs a lot of work to be deterministic, floating point math is 
> not deterministic in general, as different compilers, builds, or 
> computers will run things differently.  [Little things like actually 
> having an 80bit float stored in memory, and using it on the next 
> calculation instead of rounding to 64 bit... [32 if you're using 
> singles]] The only effective way I can see to make a deterministic 
> implementation of ODE is to write an integer-based float emulator.  
I don't think this is really going to be a problem.  It may just be run 
in single-precision mode, but even if it's not, minor prediction errors 
are recovered from easily, and objects that will be part of the actual 
physics simulation are few in number.
> 2) it appears vehicle physics in ut2004 waits for the response before 
> moving/steering... Your look controls and foot controls are responsive 
> [aka: simulated client side so you don't feel the lag] with a ping of 
> 800, but vehicle controls are very lagged.  I think online garry's mod 
> seems to run so poorly is due to the number of or detail of things 
> being updated, but I haven't played around enough to tell.
Q3's net code is not nearly as elegant when it starts lagging, things 
stutter a lot more than they do in Unreal and that's a lot less 
tolerable when you're driving the thing that's stuttering.  Try doing 
cg_nopredict 1 even on a 23-ping server and it feels really bad, 
supposedly you get the same effect in Garry's.
> 3) if an object is disabled in ODE, and stays disabled, do you still 
> bounce off of it?
That's what I'm trying to figure out.  If not, I may have to run 3 
different simulations, which I'm trying to avoid for various reasons.

As I said, right now I'm in the planning phases, so I'm trying to gather 
as much info as I can before I make any major decisions.  However, 
vehicle updates separate from the main simulation is pretty much required.