First live test showed three things wrong at once.
A client could not take a vehicle. Walking up to a locomotive and pressing the
enter-vehicle key posts entervehicle, which stage 4 classed as a world-wide
command and refused outright ("reserved for the session host"), so the client
never got a cab and every later control command died locally for want of one.
Walking into a cab is a request for a seat, not a world command: the authority
now turns it into a crew claim, for the host through the same path as for a
remote peer, and answers it the way the lobby button is answered.
Nothing but commands was ever replicated. The server sent dt and the commands
it ran, and the client simulated the rest for itself - so a pantograph the host
raised before the client joined, the contents of the memory cells the signalling
reads, brake pressures and switch positions simply never crossed the wire. The
server now streams the authoritative state a few times a second: whatever has
changed since the last one, and the whole of it every so often so a peer heals
from anything it missed. The snapshot carries the vehicle's inputs - line
breaker, battery, converter and compressor permits, pantograph valves, cab,
lights, doors - and lets the receiving peer derive the rest, plus the memory
cells and the switches.
Desync detection demanded that two state digests be equal, on a design where
the client deliberately runs its own physics. They never can be, so it reported
a desync permanently and asked for a resync every five seconds forever, which
fixed nothing because the next step disagreed again. The digest is a log line
now; what is measured instead is how far out of place the routine correction
found us, and a full resync is only asked for when even that is not catching up.
Also: a consist is put back on the rails as a whole or not at all. Correcting
one vehicle while its neighbour stayed put is what was stretching couplers
until they tore - the last test moved six vehicles out of eight, every time.
And the lobby window collapsed to nothing, because its size_max was left at the
-1 default while size_min was set, so imgui was handed a maximum smaller than
the minimum.
The protocol hung off whatever frame the renderer happened to be drawing, and
the only thing standing in for synchronisation was the sum of every vehicle's
coordinates with a random number added on top - a value that cannot be equal on
two machines and therefore reported a desync on every single step.
- Global.simulation_tick: the authority counts the steps, a client takes the
number from the authoritative frame it is executing. FRAME_INFO and the
command requests carry it, so the network timeline has one unambiguous order
independent of frame rates
- network/statehash: a versioned FNV digest of the gameplay critical state -
vehicle position, speed, direction, brake pipe and cylinder pressure, plus the
clock. Values are quantized so that float noise is not mistaken for drift, and
vehicles are folded in under their own identity and summed, so the digest does
not depend on the order the scenario created them in. Switches, memcells and
the event queue are the next candidates; they go in when stage 7 pins down
what a snapshot contains
- a client compares its own digest against the authoritative one and reports the
drift when it starts and then only now and then, rather than every step; the
overlay says how long it has been out of step and at which tick
- refusing to compare at all when the two builds disagree on the digest layout
EU07_NETWORK_VERSION is now 4.
TTrain::id() numbers cabs with a local counter, in the order each peer happens
to create them, so it cannot address a vehicle across the session. Neither was
there any way for a player to see what is available to drive.
- network/entities: PeerId (the host is peer 1, remote peers are numbered from
2, so it is a participant rather than a special case) and NetworkEntityId,
plus a registry that numbers the drivable vehicles of the loaded scenario in
name order and resolves ids back to TDynamicObject
- the server owns the numbering and publishes it as VEHICLE_LIST - name, crew
occupancy, crew capacity, AI state, availability - on every change and at
least every 120 frames, out of band so it stays out of the replay backbuffer;
a client binds the received ids to its own copy of the scenario by name
- SERVER_HELLO hands the joining peer its PeerId
- a multiplayer lobby listing that roster, with vehicles taken by other players
shown as such rather than hidden; entering one goes through the existing
entervehicle command, the vehicle is never moved
The lobby lives inside the driver mode instead of a mode of its own: the world
has to keep running while somebody is choosing (a client stops consuming the
server's frames the moment its mode is not a command processor), and the same
screen is what a player needs to change vehicles later on.
Crew occupancy is still derived from the presence of a cab instance; the real
crew model, claim handshake and AI takeover follow in stage 3.
