Multiplayer state, tick rates, and low-latency UDP networking.
3 published across 1 topics.
Deterministic lockstep, rollback netcode, and dead reckoning.
You either buffer snapshots and render the entity slightly in the past so two updates always bracket it, or you dead-reckon forward from its last position and velocity. Interpolation buys smoothness with added latency; extrapolation buys latency with being wrong the instant the entity turns.
Deterministic lockstep vs authoritative server is a trade-off between bandwidth and trust. Lockstep sends only inputs but waits on the slowest peer and risks desyncs; an authoritative server spends bandwidth on state updates but handles cheating, latency hiding and correction more cleanly.
Rollback netcode predicts remote input so local gameplay never waits for the network. When the real input arrives, the client restores the saved state from that frame and re-simulates forward, trading CPU and correction artifacts for responsive controls.