Some.... Interesting Gameplay bugs cropping up because of Networking. Heeeellp!

Development Programming & Scripting C++
1

Hey

So in my game I have two teams. Each team spawns waves of bot minions which fight each other. However I have discovered that if I am too far away from the bots fighting then they don’t do damage and thus they don’t die. This leads to a declining FPS as more and more waves of minion spawn. The minions carry axes which have a collision volume. When the collision volume overlaps another minion it is supposed to damage to that minion (which it does when the player is nearby). I thought the issue might have to do with network relevancy. However when I set the minions and their weapons to be always relevant it did not fix the problem. I was wondering if it might have to do with collision not being calculated if the player is too far away from the colllision event.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could fix this issue?

Also, the game is networked and the server player is calculating the collision, with the information sent to clients.

Thanks!

2

If the server is actually authoritative over collision it should also control enemy damage / clean up. I.e. if an enemy is hit on the server, the server calculates the damage, applies it, and if it’s below 0, destroys that enemy. That should properly cause the entity to be cleaned up on the client as well. I could see issues if you’re just calculating the results, sending that down to each client and then having them apply the damage. Network problems are always a bear to deal with, you’re best bet is to just add logging and see where things are being dropped.