   Spring-based handling of server corrections in physic sim?
  Hi!Think of an autodrome-scenario, where there are numerous collisionsbetween user-controlled vehicles, and possibly some dynamic obstacleslike crates or tire stacks. I was thinking about the best way tohandle this scenario over a network, and was hoping to collect somethoughts.My assumptions are:.) Only player input is tranferred from client to server, serverdistributes game state to clients..) Client prediction is used as described in the well known "zen ofnetworked physics" paper.) Objects must not visually penetrate, so some sort of client-sidecollision detection & handling is a must.My first approach was to have a complete dynamic simulation on eachclient which is updated regularly to reflect the servercorrections. Now a serious problem arises: If an object is corrected to a positionwhere it interpenetrates the locally predicted client object, thelocal simulation explodes, yielding very dissatisfying jitteringeffects. Interpolating the objects to their correct positions makesthings better but still not acceptable IMO.Now my idea is to let the physic simulator handle the correction byattaching springs to objects which pull them to their correctpositions. This way, all constraints resulting from contacts can beresolved by the rigid body simulator, which should overall result inbetter behaviour.Of course measures must be implemented to guarantee stability,e.g. above some error threshold springs should not be used.I found no papers describing this method, and this makes me suspect itsomehow won't work out ;-) Any ideas?regards cm   
  Here's how most games seem to do it: Everybody knows that crates shatter and barrels go flying when they hit a car. They don't actually have an effect on the local simulation of the car.The thing is, the player is too busy busting through stuff to notice that the car doesn't go "bump" over those crates. Thus, they can be purely client-side, and don't need to match up between different clients.Btw: From looking at it in the beta, I think this is what Auto Assault (the "MMO" car battling game) does with most of the destructible scenery.;You are right, that certainly is a good idea for obstacles. An entirely different beast, however, is the collision between two/multiple players, where no such approach is appropriate. Any other thoughts?regardscm;  What a lot of people do is "add smoke and shake the camera" when a local collision is detected, or a collision is sent from the server. That way, you won't notice so much if the other player drives away unscathed.What traditional military simulations do (they are peer-to-peer with no cheating problem) is to report a collision when sensed to the other guy, but let the other guy figure out whether to do anything about it. They also do that for weapons hits, btw.