I’ve found that sometimes p2p connections will have large lag spikes when communicating across the country (and on WiFi networks, that’s likely the true culprit).
I would see rare bursts of packet delay for ~1 second, that would quickly resolve. In a rollback game where inputs are predicted well, often times this would be unnoticeable.
I send up to 2s worth of input history every frame to handle these lag spikes. I also confirm inputs received, so in practice usually players are only sending a handful of recent unconfirmed inputs (with the 2s buffer available if unconfirmed inputs pile up due to lag).
My guess is their 2s window is for similar reasons, as buffer for rare connection issues. Even if lag spikes are incredibly rare, they need to be handled for a reliable player experience
I have a lot of respect and admiration for Panic, they make good quality software, made the Playdate (which hopefully has turned a profit, “spiritually” it seems like a huge win), and publish really cool games. It would make me happy to see more software companies follow that lead
I am working on a game myself, maybe I should reach out to see if it’s something Panic might be interested in publishing…
Replays are very common in fighting games as well, rollback netcode gets you most of the way to a replay system already (replaying game state from inputs is a core requirement for online play)
Some environments only expose float as the number type, love2d being one I know. Fortunately love is built on LuaJIT, which does support integer math through the built-in ‘ffi’ library.
My multiplayer arena game rounds reasonably-sized floats and compares them in the presentation layer, but uses fixed point integer math in the core rollback simulation
(I believe JS is a similar story, its number can be either int or float with no way to guarantee integer-only math. I never needed to consider the difference outside of currency for webdev, so I’m less sure)
The core of my multiplayer arena game is in fixed point
I wanted absolute certainty that the rollback netcode would result in identical simulations on any platform, and integer math provides that. With set of wrapper functions and look up tables for trig it’s not that much worse than using regular floats
I am still uncertain if I actually would have been fine with floats, being diligent to round frequently and staying within true integer representable range… but now at least I’m far less afraid of game desyncs and it wasn’t that much work
Cross platform, cross USA games have been stable and fun to play, no fixed point complaints here
Floating point determinism has been a personal bugbear of mine for a number of years. You still have to be careful, but it's at the point where it's less work than switching to fixed point (cheap as that may be). There are even libraries [0] [1] that implement full reproducibility with negligible overhead. Compilers shipping incorrectly rounded stdlib functions remains an issue, but they're slowly improving. Language level support for float reproducibility is in the C++ pipeline, and already a design consideration on the Rust side. In a decade or so determinism issues might be a distant memory once you've ensured same inputs to the same instructions in the same order.
I played with mine for a couple months, put it down for a year, and played it for a couple more months recently. There are some good games and the device just oozes fun, I haven’t regretted it
I have an Ergodox EZ setup with a layer switch under my left thumb to a code-symbols layer on my right hand, formatted kinda like numpad but for brackets and boolean math. It’s been a good way for me to eliminate a lot of pinky use
A fellow less/non verbal thinker! I resonate with a lot of what you wrote. I can think in words, but it’s not my default or most productive.
I kind of understand what you mean about reading, I find I have to invest a lot of time to comprehend the same amount as others. If I encounter an unconventional style or shape of writing it’s much harder.
When making visual art, I don’t think in words. Shapes, colors, shading, perspective together turn into a final drawing; at no point do I translate this to words. I’m not sure what trying to draw by thinking in words would even look like.
Identifying and searching for morel mushrooms in the woods also feels largely nonverbal (although near a dying elm in late spring after a rain captures an essence of the idea, and those words provide a good starting point).
Coding ends in “words”, or at least some form of written language. But when I try to solve problems I do not think in words until it is time to put fingers to keyboard.
Words are useful (I could not convey this comment otherwise), but they’re not everything. It feels extremely difficult to convey my nonverbal thoughts through an inherently verbal medium like an HN comment. Perhaps to make a wordful analogy, the difficulty is like translating an idiom from one language to one of completely different context and origin.
I don’t deny that words do shape some of my thinking, but to me it’s just one part of the whole stream of conscious.
I’m curious if anyone else feels this way about words?
Yes, definitely. Despite struggling to describe the process, I would hope the end results still demonstrate the process can be rigorous even without words (is the drawing any good, did I find morels this season, does the code work as required)
Have you ever laughed out loud at a cartoon? I don’t think I have, and I would say I enjoy cartoons quite a bit. A grin is about the best reaction I can give to one myself
I'm not sure I've ever laughed out loud at a cartoon, but as a kid, the compilation books of Charles Addams cartoons used to fill me with so much warm pleasure I would read them over and over, and his cartoons still just plain make me happy to this day. I can clearly see that Larson does that same thing for many people.
MAD is wacky. This is more England and it's casual gutter talk. All cultures have their own. Do you enjoy any British hum(o)ur?
VIZ is crass, puerile in the extreme, casually (insert your red line here)-ist on many levels, and often repetitive. It uses common slang words, so somewhat culturally revealing. It's 'wrong' on many levels but done with style, albeit sometimes a repugnant style - So you inwardly 'gasp' in revulsion but outwardly stifle a giggle.
The fake small ads are often very very funny.
Lastly, like so many gags that use the 'shock' effect, the humour doesn't last forever; take a look at an early one on Archive...
Generally, I agree with you. But I do remember coming across Parking Lot Is Full one night and having to stifle my laughing so I didn't wake up my wife who was sleeping next to me while I was reading it.
I would see rare bursts of packet delay for ~1 second, that would quickly resolve. In a rollback game where inputs are predicted well, often times this would be unnoticeable.
I send up to 2s worth of input history every frame to handle these lag spikes. I also confirm inputs received, so in practice usually players are only sending a handful of recent unconfirmed inputs (with the 2s buffer available if unconfirmed inputs pile up due to lag).
My guess is their 2s window is for similar reasons, as buffer for rare connection issues. Even if lag spikes are incredibly rare, they need to be handled for a reliable player experience
reply