I've been working on my own realtime networking engine[0] and I think there are a few important points related to network syncing that are not mentioned in this article:
1) Bandwidth. The users internet can only handle so much network throughput, so for fast paced games (where you're sending data to each client at a rate of 20+ frames per second) it becomes important to optimize your per-frame packet size. This means using techniques like binary encoding and delta compression (only send diffs).
2) Server infrastructure. For client-server games, latency is going to be a function of server placement. If you only have a single server that is deployed in us-east and a bunch of users want to play with each other in Australia, their experience is going to suffer massively. Ideally you want a global network of servers and try to route users to their closest server.
3) TCP vs UDP. Packet loss is a very real problem, and you don't want clients to be stuck waiting for old packets to be resent to them when they already have the latest data. UDP makes a major difference in gameplay when dealing with lossy networks.
1) Bandwidth. The users internet can only handle so much network throughput, so for fast paced games (where you're sending data to each client at a rate of 20+ frames per second) it becomes important to optimize your per-frame packet size. This means using techniques like binary encoding and delta compression (only send diffs).
2) Server infrastructure. For client-server games, latency is going to be a function of server placement. If you only have a single server that is deployed in us-east and a bunch of users want to play with each other in Australia, their experience is going to suffer massively. Ideally you want a global network of servers and try to route users to their closest server.
3) TCP vs UDP. Packet loss is a very real problem, and you don't want clients to be stuck waiting for old packets to be resent to them when they already have the latest data. UDP makes a major difference in gameplay when dealing with lossy networks.
[0] https://github.com/hathora/hathora