Adrian's Reviews > Multiplayer Game Programming: Architecting Networked Games

** spoiler alert ** Stuff i liked:

Great work explaining the networking OSI model.Probably best material i have read in all my technical years (including the dedicated course in university). The physical, link layer , NAT, NIC , headers all explained so nice with a lot of examples and pictures.

Great at explaining state machines , the lower level of networking in a game , Berkeley sockets , streams, checksums, retry packet strategies bandwidth etc...

Great work on expalining how to reduce traffic by using entropy prediction for the state of the game !

Superb work at explaining strategies to mitigate latency, jitter using interpolation, extrapolation and many other techniques.

Really appreciated that the book included a section on what it means for a game to have intrgrated game services (for example Steam) , anticheat strategies and moving to cloud

The stuff i didn't grok:

Though the book was deep in many aspects it jumped ahead and raced exactly when having to explain how does one manage partitioned world state in a MMORPG like World of Warcraft, how do you provide fallbacks and how do you distribute players across geograhpyically distributed servers.


I get that game programming is done mostly in C++ but i found it many times cumbersome to read the code samples with the pointers and all that stuff. I think pseudocode or any other high level language would have worked, or even more diagrams. Its ok to read a class containing 1-3 mrthods , but when the sample is pages long C++ will be in your way (if you are not a cpp dev)

Some sections included too much code and a too deep dive where i think it wasn't necessary.

I would say this book is great for starters into Networked Games, but beyond that when you have some experience i would use carefully selected chapters of this book as refrences.

Good book all in all !