let's talk about network then

[joevenzon]

Sounds good to me.

For a multiplayer system, I've been thinking about this, and I read about how this sort of thing is done in FPS games (specifically Unreal engine games). The quake 3 source is available also, but I haven't looked at it yet. My idea is basically that the "official" copy of the game world is on the server, and everyone's individual game sends their inputs to the server for processing, with timestamps indicating when they sent them. At the same time, though, the client is also processing the inputs, anticipating that the server will process them similarly. The server will send periodic state updates to the clients with timestamps, and if all went well, those states should agree with whatever the client's copy computed (if not there will be jumps, but that should only occur if there is some packet loss). The client rewinds the world back to whatever state the server sent and re-applies the input to get the client back up to the present.

Anyway, I'm still thinking about all of this, and I may be making it overly complex... I'm going to use my FPS game as a test-bed for this sort of technology and see what works out there. It should be easy to apply this back to VDrift at that point.