Distributed state

[lilnasy]

I love that this project exists! Thanks for building it.

It's exciting to see that multiplayer is being considered with a discussion about lower level serialization. I've created bespoke ECS state management before, and multiplayer required a complete rethink, so I don't envy your position.

I am curious if you have any thoughts about the API around network-shared state.

For example, let's say the "ammo" system reloads the "magazine" entity by pulling from the "inventory" entity. In multiplayer, only the authoritative world (or the host player's world in P2P connection) can be trusted to determine whether there's enough inventory. The guest player's world is only optimistic: the mutations done locally should be reversed (or reconciled) if the host state is different.

I understand that this could be done manually with a synchronization system, but that is unergonomic before it is unmaintainable. Unity has ghost entities. Godot has high level multiplayer.

[krispya]

It sounds like you are talking about rollback and similar reconciliation methods, yes? The short answer is I don't have a plan for that right now and have only done the most naive multiplayer implementations in the past. With that said, I am happy to work with people who have that experience to figure it out. I have a feeling working on multi-threading and multi-player will involve solving similar problems.