So I posted about this previously, but I now have a game title, website, and so on. I'm actually working on a collection of (lockstep multiplayer) games, but the first game in the collection is a remake of Lemmings.
Website: locksteparcade.com (https://locksteparcade.com)
Anyone who is interested in testing this, please give me a shout!
Thanks!
This is much better than the forum PMs with full binary releases of Neon Swarm. I've seen your PMs and I've read the release notes. But I didn't find time/opportunity for netplay, and thus never replied.
Interesting idea to reuse the networking engine for multiplayer clone of Gravity Force or of Asteroids. It needs both the precise local steering and the eventual synching of attacks. I guess that missiles become deadly only ~1 second after firing, similar to how builder staircases become solid for opponents only after ~1 second.
-- Simon
Quote from: Simon on January 18, 2026, 01:29:28 AMInteresting idea to reuse the networking engine for multiplayer clone of Gravity Force or of Asteroids. It needs both the precise local steering and the eventual synching of attacks. I guess that missiles become deadly only ~1 second after firing, similar to how builder staircases become solid for opponents only after ~1 second.
So yeah, a similar 'delay frames' thing is going on with those missiles, as you guessed.
The standard delay frames setting of 15 seems to work quite well, generally (maybe just needing to be bumped a bit when playing with a friend who lives in China). And then, at 60fps this works out as a quarter of a second delay between local inputs and visibility of the effects of network inputs.
But those ships can move quite far in a quarter of a second!
So the missiles do a kind of transition between different synch time 'frames of reference', over a short period after firing, when, as you say, they are not deadly (do not yet have collision enabled).
They actually perform exactly the same set of updates, on both sides of the network, so as to guarantee determinism, but these updates are either accelerated or slowed down over the transition period to achieve the synchronisation..