In order to play together, players need to experience the most important events simultaneously. If a race doesn't start at the same time for all the players, it would be unfair! Examples of similar events are plenty: the appearance of the loot after a boss fight, opening a gate in a dungeon, collecting a health buff when other players are about to kill you, and so on.
In a custom MP game the players interact with the same, physical game world. Since HypeHype games are played online, it's unavoidable that there will be some lag, also known as network latency. Synchronizing game events often involves compensating this lag in relation to a specified player's actions.
The tool for managing MP timing issues in HypeHype is the Multiplayer Sync node.
Most events like the game end, or objects being destroyed, are synced automatically by default in HypeHype, but there are cases when you need to do the synchronizing manually. These cases often involve fetching saved game data. For example, if players can collect items that are saved in their inventory, equipping such an item during game play may not be visible to other players without the help of the MP Sync node.
Interestingly, you can also use the MP Sync node as a filter: to make sure that an event takes place only for a certain player!
On the other hand, synchronizing every event manually just to be safe is not recommended: this may affect the performance of the game.
More content coming soon!