Chapter 8. Improved Latency Handling

As a multiplayer game programmer, latency is your enemy. Your job is to make your players feel like they’re playing on a server across the street, when it may really be across the country. This chapter explores some of the ways to make that happen.

The Dumb Terminal Client

On the topic of client-server network topology, Tim Sweeney famously once wrote, “The server is the man!” He was referring to the fact that in Unreal’s networking system, the server itself is the only host that necessarily has a true and correct game state. This is a traditional requirement of any cheat-resistant client-server setup: The server is the only host running a simulation that matters. That means there is always some delay between ...

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