Synchronous Cutscene Playback in Multiplayer Games
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Solution Overview
Problem
In multiplayer games, the asynchronous playback of cutscenes across different clients leads to inconsistent game progress, affecting the timing of game events and player experiences.
Innovation Solution
A method and apparatus for synchronously playing cutscenes across multiple clients, where the server transmits indication information including timestamps and network delay times to ensure all clients start and end playback simultaneously, with adjustments for clock differences and network delays, ensuring consistent game progress.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If each client independently determines and triggers cutscene playback locally, then the client can autonomously control the cutscene, but the cutscene playback becomes asynchronous across multiple clients causing inconsistent game progress
Solution Approach 1:
The server acts as an intermediary to coordinate cutscene playback across multiple clients. Instead of each client independently triggering the cutscene, the server receives playback initiation requests from clients, determines a unified playback start time, and notifies all clients to play the cutscene simultaneously, ensuring consistent game progress across the multiplayer environment
Solution Approach 2:
The server performs preliminary actions by calculating the appropriate playback start time based on network delay information received from clients. The server determines when the cutscene should start and notifies clients in advance, allowing clients to prepare for synchronous playback while maintaining client autonomy in initiating the playback process
2Reliability
If the server controls cutscene playback timing to ensure synchronization, then game progress consistency is improved, but the system complexity increases due to time coordinate conversion and network delay compensation
Solution Approach 1:
The system changes the parameter of time coordinate representation by introducing server time as a reference standard. The server converts client local times to server time coordinates and uses network delay information to calculate the exact moment when all clients should start playback simultaneously, simplifying the synchronization logic through standardized time parameter management
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements feedback mechanisms where clients provide network delay information to the server, and the server uses this feedback to calculate accurate playback timing. The server then notifies clients of the scheduled playback start time, creating a closed-loop feedback system that automatically adjusts for network conditions to ensure synchronization
Data Source
AI summary
Synchronous playback of content is provided. In a method for synchronous playback of a cutscene, first indication information is received by a first client. The first indication information is provided to the first client and a second client that participate in a game to synchronously playback the cutscene of the game. A first time point is determined by the first client based on the first indication information. The first time point indicates when the synchronous playback of the cutscene is to start on the first client. Further, the synchronous playback of the cutscene with the second client is starts in a case that the first time point is determined to be reached.