Halp! Physics Driven Multiplayer game - don't know where to start

Hi - I’m building this rather novel physics heavy (in fact I should say physics-driven) game where two players can ‘bounce’ of each other, bounce into the walls then rebound into a 3rd player sending them off flying, etc.

So it’s physics intensive to say the least. I’m now starting to implement multiplayer but I’m afraid of going down the wrong path, as I’m reading all sorts of comments around how some services don’t support physics out of the box, or not easily etc.

I don’t want to spend weeks figuring out which one is the best approach when there are experts around on this forum :slight_smile:

One important point is that I’ll be making use of bots - so I need to be able to spawn and program bots in a scalable way (having 15 devices at home won’t cut it) as well as support physics.

A tall order, I know!

Hey.

I’d suggest to use Unity’s new UNET with authoriative server and client-side prediction.
So all your physics going to be server-side, controlled by the input from clients and you’ll need to predict physics on clients to smooth out the latency lag.
This is a pretty popular approach for the networked physics.

Read more:
http://gafferongames.com/networked-physics/
http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/fast_paced_multiplayer.html

One nice guy (hey, @GenaSG ) already implemented it, so you have a great example to start from:

Have a good luck!