Key members of our team at Edgegap are attending DevCom 2024.

We’ve polled our engineers, and here are the top conferences they are most excited about. In no particular order:

Ultra low Tick Rates and Multiplayer Shooters

In realtime networked games, tick rate - the number of times the server processes data every second - directly translates to more accuracy and less latency. Most competitive shooters run at very high tick rates (64 to 128Hz) - to be as competitive and as fair as possible, because more is better.

What if you don't have the hardware and resources for it - when your game has to run on a mobile device? What if your game simply has too many calculations to process? You have to reduce the tick rate - what happens if you run a realtime game like a shooter at tick rates of 20Hz or lower?

In addition to latency and a plethora of problems associated with it, especially in fast-paced shooters, trying to get your tick rate as low as humanly possible comes with its own challenges. In this talk we'll be looking at how to deal with these challenges from a technical standpoint to preserve the competitiveness of a shooter while being able to run on very low-end hardware. Some topics explored will include

• Sub-tick accuracy

• Interpolating not just presentation but also simulation

• Dealing with input lag

• Processing aiming and movement inputs at frame-rate

• Emphasis on execution order

• Making sure your entire loop is self-contained in one tick

• Design solutions to overcome the "unfairness" of low-tick rates like high TTK(Time To Kill) and pushing players by design to adapt to the low tick rate

With Pranjal Bisht (Game Developer, SuperGaming PTE LTD)

Sunday, August 18, 2024 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM · 1 hr. (Europe/Berlin)

Tips to Overcoming Network Latency in Real-Time Multiplayer

The prevalence of real-time multiplayer functionality has emerged as a defining feature in contemporary video games. It stands as a robust cornerstone for a game's financial success, brand recognition, and overall company expansion.

However, when a studio lacks direct experience in developing and managing real-time multiplayer games, it can face a myriad of challenges throughout the development and service phases. One particularly formidable challenge is the latency in network communication, a technical obstacle stemming from the limitations of physical electrical transmission speeds.

Yet, in the realm of real-time multiplayer games, surmounting this obstacle is imperative for optimizing user fairness and enhancing the overall gaming experience. In this forthcoming presentation, Chris Hong, boasting nearly three decades of expertise and having contributed to the creation of over 12 real-time multiplayer games, endeavours to shed light on specific instances of encountered latency issues and the strategic solutions employed to overcome them.

5 tips to overcome latency

1. Pre-action and VFX: Synchronization adjustment by some delay through pre-action event and VFX

2. Sync your time: Calculate and adjust game time in a server

3. Utilization of proactive camerawork

4. Remedies for desynchronization in game design

5. Exaggerated use of effects

With Chris Hong (CEO & Chief Developer, CosmoUniverse)

Sunday, August 18, 2024 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM · 1 hr. (Europe/Berlin)

Adding” Multiplayer – Sh*t Idea or Stroke of Genius?

“The Singleplayer Idea is nice, but … have you considered ADDING Multiplayer?”.

If this sounds familiar, this talk is for you. Multiplayer has been exploding in popularity over the last decade; and with it, the idea one can “just add” multiplayer into an existing project persists. This talk will explore the realities of the matter to provide an actionable understanding of the theoretical and practical implications involved with “adding multiplayer”.

First the fundamentals will be laid out, and then case studies will be used to analyze the feasibility of “adding multiplayer” to games with asynchronous, turn based and realtime gameplay; including the financial & human resource impact of doing-so.

With Timothee Engel (Founder & Multiplayer Consultant, TheoTimeDev)

Sunday, August 18, 2024 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM · 1 hr. (Europe/Berlin)

Bringing A Large-Scale World To Life On Mobile

Developing large-scale maps for mobile devices can present a host of technical challenges, especially when being done by a small team.

How to manage extensive vertex and texture budget, what advanced rendering techniques to use when targeting hardware as low as a 150 USD mobile device with goals of delivering at least 30 FPS across all devices, and how to aid content authors via tech to speed up the iteration process.

These were some of the concerns of the team. In this talk, we'll discuss our learnings regarding the technical challenges that we encountered and the solutions we applied over a series of maps that we created over years. It'll cover the systems that we created for painless authoring, fast iterations and an optimised runtime (memory/CPU/GPU).

We will also discuss some future possibilities, as well as how these methods can be moulded for other use-cases. Being extremely constrained in our resources, we needed to be very mindful regarding our prioritisation. This could not be done if the artists and level designers are focused on mundane and repetitive tasks such as collider setups, LOD generation, markup etc.

We'll be sharing the kinds of tools we made to facilitate a relatively effortless large-map creation process that could be applied to a whole variety of genres. We'll go over potential bottlenecks and gotchas to avoid when it comes to low end mobile CPUs/GPUs, along with some tips and tricks to minimise rendering costs, memory usage, asset-loading hitches and GC problems, finding a sweet-spot between performance and visual fidelity.

With Rakshit Thakur (Engine Developer, SuperGaming PTE LTD)

Sunday, August 18, 2024 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM · 1 hr. (Europe/Berlin)