has anyone used GGPO, or some similar technique (rolling back when the users are not in sync anymore) ? it seems quite interesting.
If I remember rightly, supreme commander would quit the game on noticing any form of desync (it too would broadcast player events). would this technique have helped supCom and other games that use the same technique? I'm a little curious :D
The reason GGPO can "roll back" a game is that the simulation isn't terribly difficult, and the entire game state could fit in RAM as a snapshot. For a bigger, more complex game, fitting multiple snapshots of all the game state in RAM may not be practical (this was a big cost for There.com, for example, which kept about 1.2 seconds of rollback per entity in RAM.) The reason an RTS game will quit on desync is that the game is engineered to use perfectly deterministic simulations, making sure all player inputs are available before taking as simulation step (the "lock step" method, popularized by the Age of Empires Gamasutra article series linked to by the FAQ.)
