I have been developing a single player VR space flight sim over the past year, and all movement in the game is based on rigidbody physics (ie: AI enemies rotate through applying torques to rigidbodies. I’m interested in the long run in building a multiplayer version of this game, but I was wondering about how to handle physics.
Photon PUN and MLAPI are my potential options.
I was thinking to handle physics properly, I could merely run all physics authoritatively on the server and broadcast movement information to clients.
This does feel like it would end up being quite slow, however. Anyone have any particular recommendations on whether this is a bad idea for a fast paced game?
As you mentioned PUN: We don’t recommend it anymore for new projects. Our new networking solution Fusion is much more effective while achieving more precise results. It now has a release candidate and is being used in various VR projects (with physics interactions) already.
It’s reasonably easy to code with and you won’t hit a hard wall late in the project.
Converting single player games can be a challenge, no matter which solution you pick.
It’s not “slow” to have one authoritative host/server which sends the state to clients. Or put the other way: There is no alternative to this approach. In networking, you always end up sending some updates (state or input) to others.
Thanks. I’ll check out the dragon hunters VR example.
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