Luke Stampfli
I'm a senior engineer at Photon Engine. I've spent close to ten years making multiplayer tools and helping people build multiplayer games.
I've worked on open-source Unity netcode including Netcode for GameObjects, and I'm active in many multiplayer dev support communities. I'm now bringing that experience to Godot with Photon's new Godot SDKs.
Session
Dedicated servers are widely considered the gold standard for multiplayer games, and titles that use them dominate the Steam charts. Competitive shooters swear by them, sometimes running just 16 players per bare-metal machine, incurring huge hosting costs, and still requiring client-side anti-cheat.
Developing and orchestrating dedicated servers is enormously time-consuming, yet the resulting multiplayer quality is often lackluster. So should you blindly follow the footsteps of others, or could there be a better model for your game?
This talk explores:
- The single most important concept for any multiplayer game: time synchronization
- How to build a cheat-proof shooter without a dedicated server
- How to build a physics-based game without a central authoritative physics simulation
- How to match the exact gameplay quality of a dedicated server without running one