Synchronizing Clients

[purplemaji]

Does anyone have an easy example or know of a good tutorial outlining how to properly synchronize client states with a server?

I'm going to have a simple platformer where I want two players to be able to play at the same time. I am not clear on how to keep the client states in synch during a live action game. Turn based, or something like that I'm fine on, but I don't have a firm grasp on real time synchronizing or the gamestate/actions.

Any direction that anyone could provide would be great!

Thanks,

pm

[OneSadCookie]

If you search the boards you'll find links to descriptions of Unreal Tournament and Quake 3's networking models. These are both excellent resources (though Quake 3's is a lot easier to understand).

[purplemaji]

I have a heck of a time finding anything with the current search. Especially general stuff. Quake 3 Networking returns about a billion hits, and while I'm sure one of them hits what I need, it is like finding a needle in a haystack. I did search, just came up empty handed. Or maybe the opposite of empty handed, too many results.

Anyway, I hit IRC, and someone there provided the following link:
http://trac.bookofhook.com/bookofhook/trac.cgi/wiki/Quake3Networking

Which has a general overview of the idea behind Q3's networking, which was indeed pretty straightforward to understand, for the most part.

Is there any chance the idevgames site could have a few general tutorials/articles/FAQs outside of the forum? Or maybe just a set of links to be maintained to various outside resources such as this one?

Actually, I guess my problem here was searching the idevgames site...google searching the web actually turned up better results. I thought searching the smaller site would provide better signal/noise, but maybe there aren't enough external links coming into idevgames to filter the better results to the top like there are for the web at large. Oh well, live and learn. Thanks for the response.

[Steven]

That's an amazing link, I never even thought of that, but it seems really obvious now :)

[OneSadCookie]

For reference, in case someone else finds this thread, the Unreal one is here: http://unreal.epicgames.com/Network.htm