1500 Archers on a 28.8: Network Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond (2001)
As a low latency coder, I found it fascinating.<p>It turns out the game is synchronized by each player having the commands for each 200ms "turn" a couple of turns in advance, and then playing the actions so that the same happens on all player's machines. That includes sending random seeds around. And then there's a load of provisions for lost packets, slow machines and thus forth.<p>Is this how most games do it? I would think something like WoW couldn't do this, and indeed sometimes I'd see glitches where a character would blink (like the spell) to somewhere new.