Anthony

• Please stop writing new serialization protocols – XDR exists and if you can use it, you should
• LawBreakers Dev Diary #7 | Netcode & Replication – this short videos has some nice visualisations of client-side prediction contrasting with server-side prediction. It leaves many issues hanging (such as how to re-synchronise) and the visualised disrepancies look small, but it gives a good idea about what the fundamental problem is. I will use this in future lectures.
• Learning Go? A simple test server that supports ~9000 clients over UDP wirepair/basicudp.go
• A reminder to follow the articles of Gaffer on Games. We recently took another look at his work for an upcoming networked physics experiment. He posts a lot of interesting links, and is writing a series of articles on networking on games that may turn into a book.

SecondLife was architected in a period when the performance of the target computers was considerably lower. In particular, the graphics performance of machines is much higher. Unfortunately immersive virtual reality is now pushing even the best graphics engines to their limits and the SecondLife engine cannot cope.

Linden Labs have announced a new platform codenamed Project Sansar.  Details are a little thin on the ground at the moment, but you can listen to an interview with Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg on the excellent Voice of VR podcast.

$0.702 per Hour is quite steep (today’s pricing for Ireland data centre), especially when compared to the “workhorse” instances, such as the m1.small ($0.065 per hour) but the smallest configuration is 8 CPUs.

Whilst some people were disappointed in the PS4 announcement because they didn’t see final hardware, one very disruptive feature that is announced is the integration with Gaikai on the console itself. The idea behind Playstation Cloud Service appears to be that the PS4 console will make available a rendered stream so that others can fetch video highlights, or even control the console remotely. Its sort of a “reverse Onlive”: the servers are distributed and the console is bearing the load of rendering and compressing the video. Its a very interesting idea: get help from friends remotely, demo a new game to your friends or perhaps get technical support? Of course its not a new idea really: VNC, RDP and various remote desktop systems have been around for a very long time. It is claimed to be no cost to the performance of the console which is interesting. Of course, the console is likely to be on the fringe of the Internet so its not clear if the latency to another console on another ISP will be acceptable for games (OnLive have positioned their servers strategically so they have low latency to their clients); in the worst cast Playstation Cloud Service might be double the latency of OnLive. In the best case (geographically colocated and/or on the same ISP) it could be better. Of course the bandwidth will cost someone and in the UK at least, upload rates are throttled a lot lower than download rates.

Anyway, its a very interesting service and we look forward to seeing what use-cases Sony support.