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#haloreach#gamenetworking#latencycompensation

I Shot You First: Networking the Gameplay of Halo: Reach

GDC Festival of Gaming

555K subscribers • 54 videos on Hallway • Conference channel

YouTube
  • Recommended by 4 people: 4 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2022 to 2025.
  • Presented by David Aldridge, Bungie
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 8 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

57K views8 years ago4 recommendations

Game developmentDistributed systemsGame programmingNetworking and protocols

Bungie's David Aldridge details the networking architecture, state synchronization, and latency compensation techniques used in Halo: Reach.

In this 2011 GDC session, Bungie's David Aldridge discusses the programming that drove Halo: Reach's online networking. Register for GDC: ubm.io/2gk5KTU Join the GDC mailing list: gdconf.com/subscribe Follow GDC on Twitter: twitter.com/Official_GDC GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every day. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives.

Why it's here

4 people recommend this

What people say. Widely recommended by game developers as one of the best and most detailed talks on multiplayer game networking.

Jasper_on Hacker News • Recommends

On “MCC (Master Chief Collection) Server Incident Summary”

This talk from the Halo: Reach team might be one of my favorite game networking talks I've ever seen: link to this video

c4wrdon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Activision Cut Call of Duty's Build Time by 50%”

…eir wins like this externally. If you enjoy watching technical content and video games, the following videos are greatly entertaining deep dives into ludicrously technically complicated bugs or performance optimizations done to deliver the gaming experience that I myself take for granted. - I Shot You First: Networking the Gameplay of Halo: Reach: link to this video - 8 Frames in 16ms: Rollback Networking in Mortal Kombat and Injustice 2: link - It IS Rocket Science! The Physics of Rocket League Detailed: link - link…

stefan_bobevon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption in US-East-1 Region”

I appreciate the details this went through, especially laying out the exact timelines of operations and how overlaying those timelines produces unexpected effects. One of my all time favourite bits about distributed systems comes from the (legendary) talk at GDC - I Shot You First1 - where the speaker describes drawing sequence diagrams with tilted arrows to represent the flow of time and asking "Where is the lag?". This method has saved me many times, all throughout my career from making games, to livestream and VoD services to now fintech. Always account for the flow of time when doing a distributed operation - time's arrow always marches forward, your systems might not. But the stale re…

SahAssaron Hacker News • Recommends

On “How do video games stay in sync?”

A great talk about this is about halo reach'es networking: link to this video I haven't seen it in a few years (re-watching it now), but IIRC they talk about how they do forecasting of things like shielding, grenade throws but need to reconciliate state after.