Does client side prediction sync with the server in the past?

Question

I've spent some time now messing around and just trying to learn dead reckoning and client side prediction for the fun of it. Most of what I do doesn't need it, so i've never had a need to go down the path.

I get how to predict the client and i've got a completely deterministic setup with a lockstep of 60fps for the physics on client and server. Both client and server use the same movement code, and i'm using constant velocity to reduce complexity. I also understand how to interpolate for corrections. I also have the server and client ticking at nearly the same time (as close as one can really get it).

The problem i'm having, that doesn't seem clear to me in anything I've read (i'll put links at the end to a few things), is what does the client message sync against on the server? So, for example, the client is at 0, 0, 0, with a heading of 0, 0, 1 at tick 0. At tick 5 the client presses the button to start moving forward at 40u/s and sends the message to the server. We'll say that the trip to the server takes 50ms and 50ms back. So the server gets the message at tick 8 (roughly), and here is where I am slightly lost.

The client sent the tick they pressed the button along with the position and new velocity. Does the server do:

• A. Look back at tick 5 and say "you're good b/c you were where you should be at that tick"
• B. Check against tick 8 and say "well you where at 0, 0, 0 at tick 8, so you didn't start moving until then".

It would seem with B, which is what i'm currently doing, that the server is always sending back a correction. B also has a bad side affect that when I stop, I'm almost never where the server is and the interpolation of this feels impossible to get right.

While with A, it would seem I have to redo all collisions for that object from tick 5 thru 8 on the server, but this sends less corrections and would give a smoother feel. I understand that A is used for lag compensation when firing a weapon or taking some action that would affect other entities, but is that also used for motion?

Things I've read: http://gafferongames.com/ http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/fpm1.html Various articles out of books and other websites that seem to skip past this detail

Thanks in advance for any help.

Answer 1

That's "server reconciliation", I've written specifically about it here: http://www.gabrielgambetta.com/fpm2.html Since you link to one of these articles in your question, I assume you've read it already. Believe me, the answer is there :)

It's more like your option "A". Typically what happens is that you get a server update for a "true" state of the world sometime in the past. It will generally match what you had predicted for that instant in time, unless you ran into another player or something.

The key here is to predict the current state again by interpolating from whatever the server was the true state and the inputs the server hasn't seen yet. If both the client and the server agree on what happened at T - dT (and they must since the server is authoritative), and then apply the same inputs again (the server is already processing them, and the client keeps them until a future server update has a timestamp in the future respect to when the input ended), they must end up with identical states.

In my article, this is explained with pretty diagrams; the problem is stated in Synchronization issues, and the solution (which I outlined above) in Server reconciliation. Let me know if you still have doubts :)