Technical

This article will mainly talk about Mazified's network code and how the clients are kept in sync.

• First up, players: each player simulates their own player authoritatively and transmits their position to the host. Yes this allows for cheating technically, but this is the fastest way to deduce positions and makes your own movements feel instant. If your friend is cheating just don't play with them. I'd honestly be surprised if someone makes a hacked client for this goofy ahh game.

• The ball: whoever last hit the ball gets ball position authority. This is in order to make dribbling the ball feel instant and have no delay between hits. I have tried about 15-20 methods to keep the ball in sync, and this is the best way so far, every other method either creates jitter, extreme desync, or makes the game unplayable past ~50 ping. With this setup the game is playable up to ~200 ping.

• Bullets: bullets shot by either player are spawned by themselves and sent to the peer as a single packet containing a exact position, angle, and speed. Bullets shot by turrets are requested by the host as a global turret update. Bullet shot by bosses are computed on the host and sent as a shoot packet to the guest. Bullets are displayed on both player's screens, but are just visual on the guest's side, all damage is computed authoritatively on the host and sent to the guest as a health update. Bullets are only synced over the network at creation, since sending real time positions is extremely network intensive for a large amount of objects considering the game can stably support even thousands of bullets on screen at once. Fun fact: bullets are differentiated by different shooter IDs, being 0 (turret), 1 (player1), 2 (player2), and 8 (boss).

• Teleporters: different objects passing through teleporters are computed differently. Players both compute their own teleports and just send their position to the peer. Bullets are computed separately on the host and guest, but their teleports are synced up by a seeding algorithm. There are different seeding algorithms for player-shot and turret-shot bullets. Boss bullets do not teleport because I have so far found no way to eliminate desync with this.

• The networking code uses a giant switch statement (0-99) that determines what type of packet was just sent or received. Not all packet types are used, and I don't expect to ever use all 99 spots. Every action in the game uses its own packet type to sync up to the other player, like boss attacks and positions.