First, building a PERFECTLY deterministic sim is brutally difficult. Even for a single piece of hardware. It’s so so hard and expensive. A single bug “crashes” the game with a “desync” error. Making it work cross-platform was never really an issue.
Second, you’re bound by the slowest client. No one can go faster than the weakest link.
Third, you can’t stop cheating. Every client has full and complete world state. This is fine for co-op but a major issue for competitive.
Really the ONLY benefit to lockstep sync is it minimizes bandwidth. In the days or 56k this was a strict necessity. But these days client-server is almost always a better choice.
First, building a PERFECTLY deterministic sim is brutally difficult. Even for a single piece of hardware. It’s so so hard and expensive. A single bug “crashes” the game with a “desync” error. Making it work cross-platform was never really an issue.
Second, you’re bound by the slowest client. No one can go faster than the weakest link.
Third, you can’t stop cheating. Every client has full and complete world state. This is fine for co-op but a major issue for competitive.
Really the ONLY benefit to lockstep sync is it minimizes bandwidth. In the days or 56k this was a strict necessity. But these days client-server is almost always a better choice.