I don’t really know how to ask this question because I’m no game developer so take what I say with a massive grain of salt.
From my basic understanding clientside is as accurate as character movement and inputs should be in a game, while a projection of you as the player tries to simulate what you’re doing, which is what serverside handles. This is what other players see you doing, which isn’t perfect as there will be some bits of lag and rubberbanding but it isn’t a big deal.
The reason I’m bringing this up is since the very first alpha of this game, the character movement and inputs FEEL like you the player are constantly playing serverside. Even in low populated servers, good ping and no lag spikes in sight I’ve been getting slight bits of rubberbanding issues consistently as if the game is trying to figure out the serverside projection of my character and forcing it on my movements.
Because of this I never really took any of the PVP modes seriously unlike in GMTower because everything just feels… jank. Been kinda waiting for the day this gets addressed or overhauled or fixed but now I’m wondering if it’s just me having this issue. This is all really hard to explain.
Like I said I’m no dev but I would be very interested in the behind the scene on what I might be trying to talk about more clearly.
(disclaimer im not a game dev either)
I’m gonna tackle the wording of the question in the topic head on (with no disrespect of course) by saying that it probably should’ve been worded differently. The simple fact that you connect to a server 95% of the time (barring hosting a gameworld/condo yourself) means that everything you do is server sided because this is what the server must report to other players. Of course, hosting yourself basically means you are both the Client & Server, so what your Client sees is also what your Server sees.
That said, the wording you were probably looking for was asking about the netcode. I don’t know the specifics about how Tower (or for that matter UE4) handles it, but I’ll summarize what I’ve noticed are the main issues with TU’s networking:
- The server application that TU uses for Plazas only runs on a single thread (1 CPU core basically). This means the application struggles to multitask as it can only handle one thing at a time, which given the massive amount of stuff that can happen at once in a plaza explains why it struggles when there’s more players connected.
- Lag Compensation might not be that great? I can’t say this with any remote amount of certainty (a dev would have a more insightful answer) but just going off your post this would explain the rubber banding even on low pop servers. Clients & Servers disagree all the time on your positioning, but the server is the authority on the gamestate, so it will always correct you. Lag compensation generally should cover the difference so its not easily noticeable (up to a certain point, can’t really do much for people with 400 ping, right?).
Anyway, hopefully it’s a little insightful (even if I’m talking out of my rear here). Would definitely love a dev response since they’ll really know what’s going on.
(also this is maybe a good read if ur interested)
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This was very insightful! Thanks for explaining this better than I ever could.
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