Session Name: | 'Knockout City's' Parallel, Deterministic, and Rewindable Entity System |
Speaker(s): | Chris McEvoy |
Company Name(s): | Velan Studios |
Track / Format: | Programming |
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Overview: | We present a general-purpose game entity system that supports deterministic, parallel computation and the ability to rewind world state within a time window. Such a system can be used to support robust client-side prediction in a networked game, world state scrubbing at development time, and effective utilization of processing power on multi-core hardware. We discuss how the entity system, working together with our scripting language, ensures concurrent, deterministic, and efficient data flow, in a way that is largely transparent to users of the system. We show how this system was used on "Knockout City", an online multiplayer action game with dodgeball mechanics, to author everything from core gameplay to user interface and player progression. |