For an example of what GGPO feels like when implemented in a game from day one, this Reddit thread illuminates what's possible: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/lolukg/guilty_gear_s... - "I was playing matches with a friend in Denmark from the east coast of the US without any issues whatsoever. It's like black magic. If this kind of netcode is what we have to look forward to with GGS, I literally won't play any other fighting game that doesn't have it from here on."
Taking a step back from gaming applications though: I'd love to see a convergence between those researching CRDTs and those who have implemented rollback netcode in the wild. This article from September 2020, by one of the contributors to Google Wave back in the day, is a great overview: https://josephg.com/blog/crdts-are-the-future/
There's a fascinating confluence of talents needed to generally solve the problem of "how do you keep people in a flow-state when collaborating in the presence of network delay" - which is more applicable now than ever. There's psychology, user experience design, user interface design, deep domain knowledge, fundamental CRDT research, the types of artistry that go into really good gaming netcode, people who have implemented undo stacks in massive desktop applications and know all the warts that arise there, security researchers, distributed systems researchers (the latter two because this will enable decentralized applications in a huge way)... All these people will come together in the coming years to make computing seemingly defy the laws of physics. It's an exciting time to be a software engineer.
For those who want to skip to the code, the article links to these resources:
https://www.ggpo.net/
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nRa3cRBQmKj0-SEyrT_1VNOkPOJ... - a writeup on the GGPO library including code samples of how it works
For an example of what GGPO feels like when implemented in a game from day one, this Reddit thread illuminates what's possible: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/lolukg/guilty_gear_s... - "I was playing matches with a friend in Denmark from the east coast of the US without any issues whatsoever. It's like black magic. If this kind of netcode is what we have to look forward to with GGS, I literally won't play any other fighting game that doesn't have it from here on."
Taking a step back from gaming applications though: I'd love to see a convergence between those researching CRDTs and those who have implemented rollback netcode in the wild. This article from September 2020, by one of the contributors to Google Wave back in the day, is a great overview: https://josephg.com/blog/crdts-are-the-future/
There's a fascinating confluence of talents needed to generally solve the problem of "how do you keep people in a flow-state when collaborating in the presence of network delay" - which is more applicable now than ever. There's psychology, user experience design, user interface design, deep domain knowledge, fundamental CRDT research, the types of artistry that go into really good gaming netcode, people who have implemented undo stacks in massive desktop applications and know all the warts that arise there, security researchers, distributed systems researchers (the latter two because this will enable decentralized applications in a huge way)... All these people will come together in the coming years to make computing seemingly defy the laws of physics. It's an exciting time to be a software engineer.