Battlezone Forums

I am working on a multiplayer game, and am building a little UI to display the quality of the network connection on the client. I remembered that BZ2 had a histogram you could enable from the console, and I was wondering what exactly it represented.

One of the histogram bars represents your framerate, the other one has to do with your network connection (ie: packets recieved/transmitted), and then there's a bunch of technical stuff about the lockstep, local turn, etc.

Lockstep is the network strategy to synchronize multiplayer game state. In every step, which is a period of few milliseconds (dependent on latency), a client receives from server a set of commands to execute in 2nd next step. The client uses this to simulate the world, and extrapolate animations, physics etc. All clients are supposed to execute the same turn at the same time. Lag is pain You can see in that histogram information about the steps (or turns).

It's a very popular way of doing networking in games, and I've done it once.

I'm sure GSH can provide a more useful insight.

BZ2 uses the RTS style of networking which is why it has many niggles with the FPS aspects in multiplayer. This information might help you understand BZ2's histogram.

The game sends a game state that is basicly a save of the entire mission to remove players on join or resync, both sides only transmit a minimal amount of data between each other otherwise such as orders or user inputs. As a result, all sides attempt to simulate the exact same actions and if they go out of sync, resync. These worlds must exist at the same time, doing the same things, moving on in lockstep, hence the term. Nice thing with BZ2 is the resync, many RTS games would just eject the other player.

You can sort of think of RTS MP logic sort of like playing chess my mail sending all your movements back and forth.

FPS games handle this differently.

Thanks for the info, everybody.

it actually reflects the status of the wormhole between Core and Elysium

Red Devil wrote:it actually reflects the status of the wormhole between Core and Elysium

I wasn't aware there was one.

AHadley wrote:

Red Devil wrote:it actually reflects the status of the wormhole between Core and Elysium

I wasn't aware there was one.

Neither was anyone else, thanks RD.