I’ve been thinking about this lately. I guess it just doesn’t make sense to me that 40 years ago we were barely able to move pixels across a screen and now there are games where even hundreds of people can play games like first person shooters on servers simultaneously where reactions down to the millisecond commonly decide the outcome of a game. How can we match the inputs of everyone and have them appear on someone else’s screen? Is it simply that information travels at the speed of light and we are really good at organizing it?
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One thing that may not have been covered yet is the streamlining of data.
For example, very little data is transmitter between servers and clients. When you first see a character, their attributes are sent to your computer and your computer shows the character. Only if the character changes something will addition information need to be transmitter. ( grog helm now model 463543) etc.
Once your appearance is shared, the only data that needs to be shared is position, direction, and action. And those only need to be shared when they change.
Make your character dance? The dance action is sent as a small value to everyone who “sees “ you, and each players computer will then render the action.
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