D3 Networking: Communication

To get a multiplayer game working, the computers from the players have to ‘talk’ to each other. In Doom3 this is done using the TCP/IP protocol. Basically we can differ between Client to Server communication and more importantly Server to Client communication. There is some traffic between the master server and the clients as well to scan the network for games going on. But that is not relevant to modding and will only be briefly touched in this article.

Server to Client

For modding, server to client communication is the most important part. Typically you will be modifying some entities first. After that it’s up to you how to get the stuff transmitted to the client. One example would be a coop mod where one wants to get the monsters synchronised over the network. There are two ways to get data transmitted, which are called:

• Snapshots
• Serverside messages (events)

First of all are snapshots. Snapshots can be consired as a photo of the current scene (or just called the state of the game, known as the gamestate ). Just think about freezing a scene and transmitting all relevant stuff over the network so that the client can replicate the scene from the data. However, what is relevant? Everything? Just the area around the player? All that nasty scripting stuff? It should be clear that sending all would be too much. Several mechanisms exist to reduce the traffic load. Some of them have to be implemented by the modder, some of them are already built into the engine. The topics here are delta synchronisation and PVS-based synchronisation of entities. However, these will be covered later on when the focus shifts to code.

Another way to get data over the network is by sending events. Events are mostly used for stuff that does not modify the gamestate, like e.g. a chat message or things which are singular, e.g. an explosion effect or switching a monsters animation.

Furthermore the engine itself does transmit some data, e.g. to get the timing right for example. Once again will this be left out as it is not relevant for modding.

Client to Server

On the client side are no snapshots like on the server side. There are just events to communicate with the server. Those events work similar to the server ones. Another way to send data to the server is the userinfo dictionary .

The engine itself generates some traffic as well, mostly for sending the keyboard input.

Master Server to Client

The client receives the serverlist from the master server. This list allows a client to query a server or connect to it.

Server to Master Server

The server sends all ‘server info’ CVars to the master server. This way, a client can retrieve some more info when it gets the serverlist from the master server.