Is true sync good for a football game?

Hi,

We are working on a prototype of a football game, looking very much like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqhzp5dJ0uo

We've got it working and we are having some problems.

- If a player disconnects the game is over. This isn't very good for a mobile game.
- Crossplatform sometimes desyncs. It happens when we play editor vs windows, editor vs android, windows vs android...
- Sometimes the game randomly desyncs. We are aware it might be a programming error on our side, but we've checked everything so many times.
- If a client lags for some seconds, the game is over / it freezes for everyone. I understand why this happens, not blaming Photon, but still, not good for a mobile game.

The point of using truesync is to assure everyone sees the same gameplay and it feels good for everyone. Can we achieve this with PUN or any other of the Pohoton services?

Thanks!

Comments

  • It is probably not the right choice for disconnect-reconnect type situations. We are running into this issue too.
  • Hello @Raúl, well lets reply some statements:
    1 - Yes, I agree with you, it is not good for a mobile game. Unfortunately we don't support something like a late join, it is not so simple in a lockstep scenario.
    2 - This should not happens, it is probably some bug on TrueSync's internal.
    3 - This is very tricky, when the game is bigger (more lines of code), it could be hard to find the reason of desyncs, I personally spend some days to find both cases, since errors on our side as errors on dev side. There is no silver bullet on this case :/.
    4 - Yep, in the new version of TrueSync we a different process to relay events/player inputs, it will be easier to propose some solution for this cases where a client lags for some time.

    Yes you could achieve, the propose of TrueSync is to offer this gameplay sync in a lockstep way, but we can do it using a different approach, did you take a look on Photon Bolt?
  • Thanks for the comments. I'll have a look at Bolt and report back :)
  • Any chance I can test Bolt for free? I'm already paying a subscription, don't really want to spend money on testing stuff.
  • By the way, I tested with PUN, all kinds of interpolation and the ball makes strange movements, due to interpolation, and it feels horrible at 70ms ping. TrueSync is a much better engine for a physics based game IMO, but the problems I mention make me think it's not even worth trying to develop the whole game.
  • I understand @Raúl, sadly we have those issues you mentioned. Well, Bolt is supposed to be available soon for free, which subscription do you already have?