To Pixelux: Questions

[Mr. Wonko]

Hmm I didn't really get it... Is there built-in (de)serialization or not? That'd be the way to achieve network synchronisation, right?

Looking forward to the free DMM2 release anyway. The limit was the maximum amount of active bodies, right? So if the maximum is already hit and something hits a sleeping body nothing will happen?

[Mac]

I'm guessing that was a yes to the question about being able to keep objects in synch.

However this confused me a bit:

We do have a way to compress and instance DMM objects so that you don't have to have a lot of different meshes in a scene, though if you start destroying things you will need to preserve state.

Could you please elaborate a little on this? How does it relate to the problem of synchronization?

Thanks.

[dmmjedi]

Sorry for the confusion. Synchronization, determinism and serialization are three separate things I shouldn't have mixed up.

Serialization is a means of saving the state of DMM objects into a chunk of memory (which could then also be compressed). You would want to use serialization to move objects between scenes or other contexts.

Synchronization is something that is implicit when full determinism is guaranteed. DMM is deterministic within a platform (Xbox 360, PS3) and we work to keep it that way between versions.

The active element limit on the free version will limit the number of finite elements DMM will simulate at any given time. If you have a lot more active elements try and go live in addition to the ones that are already live, the system will ignore them until the budget allows them to become active.

-dmmjedi

[Mr. Wonko]

You already said it isn't deterministic on the computer. Since the free version will only support the pc that's also the platform I'm most interested in. Since determination is not guaranteed, some other way of keeping it in sync is required - for example serializing the objects at certain key frames, sending them over the network and deserializing them again. Saving/loading also needs (de)serializing.

"scenes or other contexts" - Could you explain the structure of the engine a little more? I guess a scene is a "physical world"...

Documentation will be released together with the free API, right?

[dmmjedi]

I shouldn't really make statements about a lack of determinism on PC due to different configurations. As the development is still going on, we are working to enforce determinism on the PC as well as the other platforms DMM2 will run on. We will consider adding a synchronization mechanism to allow easy synching of multiplayer scenes. Serializing objects can help with that from a game perspective (it is important to note that synching the game's context and synching DMM context are interrelated but not the same).

A "scene" is a context or data structure within which DMM handles a set of objects.

To answer your other question, yes, documentation and sample code will be included with the free DMM2 version.