The systems behind SyncForge
Every multiplayer game faces the same impossible-looking problem: two players, on two machines, separated by real network delay, have to agree on one shared world. SyncForge lets you tune the network and watch exactly how — and where — that agreement breaks.
Tick rate & latency
The tick rate is how many times per second the world updates; the latency is how long a message takes to cross the wire. Because of latency, you always see other players a little in the past — how far is simply speed × latency.
The four ways to handle delay
- Naive — just show the last message you got. Everyone watches the past.
- Interpolation — smooth the motion so it never stutters. Fixes jitter, not lag.
- Prediction — guess where the other player is now. Perfect until they change direction, when your guess snaps back — the "rubber-banding" you feel in laggy games.
- Rollback — when a late input arrives, re-run the simulation from that moment. The most consistent, and the most expensive.
Why cheaters exist
If no one holds the one true copy of the world, a player's machine can claim anything — a headshot that never happened, a wall that isn't there — and no one can prove otherwise. That's why real games keep a server as the authority: the client asks, the server decides.
The unfixable exercise
Try setting authority to No server. The two peers keep separate clocks and drift apart forever — a consistent, real-time shared world provably needs a shared authority. That's the same reason an offline "cartridge" world (a game you carry as a file) is single-player or turn-based, never live-shared: the Cartridge Rule meets the limits of physics.