transcience/docs/NETCODE.md

Netcode

Model

Authoritative dedicated server, clients send input only, with client-side prediction and reconciliation for the local player.

client                          server (60 Hz)
  |                               |
  |-- InputFrame (60 Hz, x3) ---->|  queue_input(): validate, drop, sort
  |   move, aim, 5 button bits,   |  SimWorld.step(): move, AI, emitters,
  |   inventory slot              |    integrate bullets, resolve hits, items
  |<-- events (reliable, ch 3) ---|  bullet spawns/despawns, hits, deaths,
  |                               |    item pickups/uses/drops
  |<-- snapshot (unrel., ch 2) ---|  players, enemies, boss, ground loot,
  |                               |    your own inventory @ 20 Hz
  |                               |
  predict locally, reconcile      authoritative for everything

The client has no message that expresses a position, a hit, damage taken, a completed escape, or an item it now owns. This is deliberate and stronger than validating such messages after the fact: there is no code path to exploit, only intent to interpret.

Item actions are worth noting as the newest thing to resist becoming a message of its own. Using or dropping an item is a request that reaches the server as two button bits and a slot number on the ordinary input frame, and the server decides what — if anything — happened. See Item actions ride the input frame below.

Why bullets are not replicated as state

A bullet hell has hundreds of live bullets — this project peaks at ~350 with one boss and four players. Sending a position per bullet per snapshot would be roughly 350 × 8 bytes × 20 Hz ≈ 56 KB/s per client and would grow with the pattern density, which is the one thing you want freedom to increase.

Instead the server sends one spawn event per bullet, once: uid, position, velocity, radius, lifetime, kind, team, acceleration, turn rate (~36 bytes). Both sides then run the identical integration in BulletPool.step(). A bullet that expires or leaves the arena dies on both sides with no traffic at all.

The only bullets that need a despawn message are the ones killed early by a hit, because that is the one outcome a client cannot derive.

Cost at the same peak: a few KB/s, dominated by whatever the patterns are actually firing rather than by how much is in the air.

tests/integration/test_replica_parity.gd is the test that keeps this honest. It runs the server and a replica side by side for 900 ticks of a boss fight — once in-process, once with every event encoded and decoded through the real wire format — and asserts that every live bullet matches within 0.01 px (1 px through float32 on the wire). If that test fails, the bullets on screen are no longer the bullets that can kill you.

Note what this does not require: lockstep determinism. Clients simulate bullets for display only. The server never reads a client's bullet state, so float drift between machines is a cosmetic concern, not a correctness one.

Hit validation

All in SimWorld._resolve_bullet_hits() and _resolve_contact_damage(), server only, circle-vs-circle:

• Enemy bullet → player: skipped entirely while the player has i-frames, so a dense pattern costs one hit, not thirty. The bullet is consumed and a BULLET_DESPAWN goes out.
• Player bullet → boss, then enemies: first overlap consumes the bullet. Boss damage is scaled by the current phase's damage_taken_mult.
• Enemy body → player: contact damage, same i-frame gate.

There is no lag compensation and no rewind. For a bullet hell that is the right call: what the player is dodging is their own position against a bullet field, and rewinding the world to a shooter's view would mean a player who dodged on their screen still gets hit. The cost is that a high-ping player's shots at a moving enemy land where the enemy was on the server. Enemies are large and slow relative to bullet speed, so this reads as latency rather than unfairness. If it becomes a complaint, the fix is to lag-compensate player bullets against enemies only, never enemy bullets against players.

Input timing, and a bug worth remembering

The client numbers its input frames INPUT_TARGET_LEAD ticks ahead of the server's tick; the server accepts anything within INPUT_MAX_LEAD and re-syncs nothing itself. These two numbers must be chosen together.

They originally were not — the server dropped inputs past a lead of 12, while the client only corrected itself past 16. A client whose lead drifted into 13–16 therefore had every input silently rejected, while believing its own timing was fine. The server, receiving nothing, coasted on the last input it had (held_input) and then stopped; the client kept predicting forward. The ship and the authoritative position separated permanently, the reconciler fought it every snapshot, and the player got shoved around. It needed two independent clocks to drift apart, so it appeared only after minutes of play — and never recovered, because nothing in the loop could notice.

Two defences now:

1. INPUT_MAX_LEAD (40) is far wider than the client's correction band (INPUT_LEAD_MIN 3 … INPUT_LEAD_MAX 20), so the client always re-syncs long before the server starts refusing anything. test_input_lead.gd asserts that ordering directly, so narrowing the window fails a test rather than shipping.
2. An ack-stall detector: if last_input_tick does not advance across INPUT_ACK_STALL_LIMIT snapshots, the client concludes its numbering is outside the window and hard re-syncs. Lead alone cannot detect this, because a wrong lead looks perfectly normal from the client's side. This is the backstop that makes the whole class of failure self-healing regardless of cause.

tools/diag_prediction.gd injects a +14 tick drift mid-run and asserts the gap returns to normal; it exits non-zero if it does not.

Every exit runs the same channel

There is deliberately no "I am leaving cleanly" message. The escape channel is keyed on the socket closing, so all four ways out converge on it:

Route	Path
Hold F	BTN_ESCAPE -> channel
Menu -> "Return to hub"	synthesises a held BTN_ESCAPE -> channel
Menu -> "Disconnect to menu"	Net.shutdown() -> socket close -> linkdead -> channel
Killing the process / pulling the cable	socket close -> linkdead -> channel

The last two are the same server-side code path, and tools/smoke.sh asserts both: one bot is SIGKILLed mid-dungeon, another calls the same Net.shutdown() the menu button calls. Adding a clean-leave message that skipped the channel would break that test, which is the point of having it.

The menu says so out loud when you are in a dungeon -- the mechanic only reads as fair if the player knows the cost before clicking.

Maps are streamed, never sent

A dungeon's geometry reaches a client as chunks around that client's own player, and nothing else. In particular the server does not send the generation seed, even though maps are a pure function of (kind, seed, depth) and sending two integers would be far cheaper: a client holding the seed can regenerate the entire dungeon locally, which is a complete map hack requiring no skill. Streaming bounds what a modified client can know to roughly where its player has physically been.

MAP_STREAM_RADIUS (900u) is deliberately wider than FOG_VIEW_RADIUS (460u). The client needs real geometry it cannot see, because it predicts its own movement against walls and simulates bullets that die on them. The accepted trade is that a cheater sees somewhat further than the fog shows -- what they cannot get is the floor plan.

Two consequences fall out of partial knowledge:

• Wall deaths are announced. A bullet dying to its lifetime or by leaving the map is derivable from the spawn event and the map's dimensions, so it costs nothing. A bullet dying against a wall is not derivable by a client that has not been streamed that wall, so the server sends an explicit BULLET_DESPAWN. Getting the order of those two checks wrong is easy and was caught by a test: out-of-bounds tiles read as WALL by design, so testing geometry before bounds reports every bullet that merely left the map as a wall kill.
• Unknown tiles are treated as empty, not solid, so an unstreamed region can never wrongly stop a prediction. The stream radius keeps far enough ahead of the player that this never decides anything visible.

Hard fog is therefore a rendering rule, not a secrecy mechanism. The secrecy lives in what the server declines to send: terrain outside the stream radius, and actors outside the interest radius (below).

Actors are scoped per peer

Snapshots are encoded once per peer, not once and broadcast: an actor further than ACTOR_INTEREST_RADIUS (800u) from a player is never sent to that player. Before this, fog was hiding enemies the client had already been handed, which is no defence at all against a modified client.

Measured cost of encoding four filtered snapshots instead of one shared: 95.6µs against 24.9µs, which amortised over the 3-tick snapshot interval is 0.032 ms/tick — 0.2% of the frame budget.

Two rules fall out of it:

• The observer's own player record is never filtered, however far outside the radius the arithmetic puts it. The client reconciles its prediction against that record; dropping it would break the player's own movement rather than merely hide someone.
• Bullet despawns are not filtered, only spawns. A client that was told about a bullet must always be told it died, or it keeps a phantom until the lifetime expires.

Bullet spawns are filtered per bullet: a spawn is sent if that bullet, at its speed and acceleration over its remaining life, could reach ground the player can see (ServerRuntime._bullet_concerns). The failure modes are not symmetric — an enemy appearing at the edge of sight is cosmetic, a bullet withheld at spawn that later flies into view is invisible damage — so the rule errs long.

It used to be a flat radius, BULLET_INTEREST_RADIUS, sized for the longest-travelling shot in the game. That was a leak: every spawn event carries the shooter's exact position, and at 2900 units the radius exceeded the entire depth-1 map, so every firing enemy anywhere on the floor was located for every player — past the actor cull, past the map stream, through the fog. The constant survives only as a hard ceiling, and test_interest.gd checks both: that no real enemy's bullet is announced across a dungeon, and that the ceiling still covers the longest shot in the game.

The same rule decides what is sent to a player arriving mid-fight (_live_bullet_events), which is the moment they have seen least of the map.

Loot has two visibilities, and one of them is an interest rule

Ground loot rides the snapshot rather than an event stream: items do not move, so re-sending them 20 times a second costs almost nothing and a lost packet costs nothing at all — which a spawn-once event could not claim.

Each item is either world-shared (SimLoot.owner_peer == 0) or player-instanced (owned by exactly one peer). The instanced kind is filtered in NetCodec.encode_snapshot, next to the actor interest radius and for the same reason: a peer is never told that another player's copy exists, so a modified client has nothing to reveal. Hiding it in the UI would have been the same class of mistake as relying on fog to hide enemies.

Two consequences:

• An instanced item leaves with its owner. SimWorld.remove_player deletes loot owned by the departing peer. Nobody else can see or take it, so leaving it behind would be an invisible entity the instance carries until it closes.
• Anything dropped becomes world-shared, whatever it was before. That is what makes dropping worth having.

The Warden's Ration exists to keep this path honest: it is dropped instanced on every boss kill, so the filter runs in every real fight rather than only in tests.

Which dungeon you enter is a position, not a request

The hub holds a list of portals, each bound to a dungeon id. Pressing interact resolves the player's server-side position through SimWorld.portal_at(), and the resulting PORTAL_USED event carries which dungeon that entrance opens.

There is no client message that names a dungeon, and there must not be: one would let any client ask for the Proving Grounds' loot rate — ten times the drop chance — and bring the results back to the hub. The same reasoning as everywhere else here; the difference between "the server checks your request" and "there is no request" is the whole model.

enter_instance carries the portal list (position plus a dungeon index, via NetCodec.encode_portals) and the id of the dungeon you have arrived in. The client needs the latter to scale the boss's health ceiling the same way the server did, or the boss bar would sit near empty for an entire easy fight.

Item actions ride the input frame

InputFrame carries BTN_USE, BTN_DROP and a slot byte (10 bytes total, up from 9). The alternative — a reliable c_use_item(slot) RPC — would have needed its own replay guard, its own rate limit, and its own ordering story against the movement on the same tick. The input stream already has all three.

The one thing it does not give for free is edge detection. The client repeats its last few frames every tick (that redundancy is what covers a dropped packet) and a starved server coasts on the last frame it holds, so a level-triggered read would spend four items in four ticks. SimPlayer.prev_buttons and prev_slot hold the edge; the slot is part of it, so tapping 2 while 1 is still held is a second action rather than a swallowed one. Movement and fire stay level-triggered — holding them is exactly what you mean.

Pickup shares BTN_INTERACT with the dungeon portal. Loot wins when both are in reach, but only on a tick where something was actually taken, so a full bag cannot leave a player standing on the portal unable to use it.

Upgrades change what a shot is, and none of it is client-side

A player's damage, fire rate, bullet speed, shot count and every rider (splitting, poison, erasure) come from PlayerStats, rebuilt on the server from the upgrade ids the character holds. The client builds its own copy for the choice screen's summary, and that copy decides nothing — it exists so the panel can show real numbers instead of promises.

Three things fall out of it worth writing down:

• The riders live on the bullet, not on the shooter. A shot already in flight keeps what it was fired with, so taking Poison mid-flight cannot reach back and poison it. They stay zero on a replica, which never resolves a hit and has no use for them.
• Choosing an upgrade is intent, checked three ways. The client sends an index; the server checks a choice is owed, that the index names one of the three options it put on the table, and that the player is standing at the hub NPC. The index selects from a list the client did not write.
• The offer is server state. Rolled once, stored on the character, and persisted — so closing the screen is not a reroll, and neither is a crash.

No contact damage

Nothing hurts you by touching it. Every threat is a bullet you can see and dodge, which is the contract the genre runs on; an enemy that damages you for occupying the same space is an unavoidable, unreadable hit.

The Stalker used to be exactly that -- it walked at you and dealt contact damage. It now carries a point-blank shotgun instead: five pellets, 62 degrees, and an 18-tick lifetime that gives it about 78px of reach, so it still has to close the distance and still leaves nothing lingering in the arena. tests/unit/test_content.gd asserts that every hostile enemy has at least one emitter, so a new enemy cannot quietly reintroduce the mechanic.

No invulnerability frames

A hit grants no immunity — every bullet that touches you deals its damage. In a bullet hell the wall is the threat, and i-frames invert that: you are punished for the first bullet of a pattern and gifted the next thirty, which makes dense patterns safer than sparse ones. Measured cost: a stationary player survives ~13.6s of the Warden's opening phase, ~17.5s while drifting aimlessly.

Arrival protection (SPAWN_GRACE_TICKS) is the sole exception, and it is a transition, not a combat mechanic.

Input validation

SimWorld.queue_input() is the single audit point. It drops:

Case	Guard
Replay of a consumed tick	f.tick <= p.last_input_tick
Stale input	f.tick < tick - INPUT_MAX_AGE
Input claiming the future	f.tick > tick + INPUT_MAX_LEAD
Flood	queue capped at INPUT_MAX_AGE, oldest dropped
Leaving the hub early after death	RESPAWN_LOCKOUT_TICKS, server-side
Item action repeated by a held key	edge-triggered against prev_buttons / prev_slot
Inventory slot index out of range	SimPlayer.take_slot answers "nothing"
Upgrade choice made anywhere but the hub NPC	SimWorld.at_upgrade_npc, server-side position
Upgrade index outside the server's own offer	CharacterStore.take_upgrade refuses

The respawn lockout lives in SimWorld, not only in the HUD's disabled button — but note what reaches it. A connected player is unbound on the tick it dies and sent to the roster screen (a settled decision; see DECISIONS.md), so it never waits at all. The lockout governs the linkdead body, which has nobody to show a roster to and asks for itself.

Beyond that, the wire format itself constrains the cheat surface: the move vector is two signed bytes at 1/100 precision, and Movement.sanitize_move() clamps to the unit disc, so no packet can express extra speed. Fire rate is a server-side cooldown; holding the button every tick fires at exactly the same rate as tapping it correctly.

A client that stops sending coasts on its last input for INPUT_MAX_AGE ticks and then stops, so a dropped connection does not leave a player sliding.

Leaving a run, and why disconnecting is not an escape

The emergency escape is a one-second server-owned channel that damage does not interrupt. That combination is deliberate and the two halves depend on each other.

An interruptible channel sounds like the right kind of risk until you follow it through: a player about to die under fire can never finish the channel, so killing the game process becomes strictly better than using the button. The escape hatch turns into the exploit.

So a dropped connection runs the same channel. On disconnect the peer is removed from the send list but its player stays in the world (SimPlayer.linkdead), treated as holding the escape button down, still fully killable, for the same second everyone else pays. Only when that resolves is the peer forgotten. Pulling the plug is therefore never cheaper than pressing the key, and there is no timing window where it is.

Two details that are easy to get wrong and are covered by tests:

• An instance must not close while a linkdead body is still resolving (Instance.has_linkdead()), or a solo player's drop would delete their body on the next tick and hand back the exact exploit.
• Dying still ends the channel. That is the one thing the escape cannot beat, and it is what keeps the second a real risk rather than a formality.

tools/smoke.sh SIGKILLs a bot mid-dungeon and asserts the server channels it out rather than dropping it instantly.

Arriving in a run

Entering a dungeon grants SimConfig.SPAWN_GRACE_TICKS (2s) of arrival protection: invulnerable and unable to shoot. Both halves matter — invulnerability alone would make the spawn point a free firing position. It is flagged in the snapshot (Protocol.F_SPAWN_GRACE) so every client can draw it on every protected ship, not just its own.

Prediction and reconciliation

ClientRuntime keeps every unacknowledged InputFrame. Each snapshot echoes last_input_tick per player; on receipt the client discards acknowledged frames, takes the server's authoritative position, and replays the rest through the same Movement.step_player() the server used. Divergence over 24 px snaps; smaller errors lerp at 0.3 so ordinary jitter does not read as rubber-banding.

ClientRuntime sets process_physics_priority = -10 so it samples and sends input before ServerRuntime ticks. This matters only on a listen server, where both live in one process: with the default tree order the server ran first, so input sampled on frame N was not consumed until frame N+1, leaving the drawn ship a permanent one tick (4px at 240 u/s) ahead of the authoritative one — and bullets, which spawn at the authoritative position, visibly trailed behind the ship. tools/diag_prediction.gd measures this gap; it is currently ~0.1px mean, down from a constant 4.00px.

The other half of that fix is SimConfig.PLAYER_MUZZLE_OFFSET, derived from the visual radius rather than the hitbox. A remote client still draws its ship a tick or two ahead of the server, and that margin is what keeps bullets emerging from the nose rather than the middle of the sprite.

Remote players, enemies and the boss are interpolated between the last two snapshots. Bullets are not interpolated — they are simulated, and a spawn event carries the server tick it was generated at so the client fast-forwards the bullet by the packet's flight time (BulletPool.advance_slot()) instead of popping it in at the muzzle a round-trip late.

Channels

ENet channels keep a burst of reliable bullet events from head-of-line blocking the snapshot stream:

Channel	Traffic	Mode
1	handshake, instance transitions	reliable
2	snapshots	unreliable, newest wins
3	bullet spawns/despawns, hits	reliable ordered
4	client input	unreliable ordered

Protocol.VERSION is checked at handshake and mismatched clients are rejected with a reason, rather than desyncing later.

What the handshake and the server refuse

• One account, one session. A second connection claiming an account that is already playing is refused — the newcomer, not the incumbent, or a spoofed claim would kick anyone off. Two peers on one account each held a copy of one character's bag, which duplicated items. A linkdead body still holds its account until its escape channel resolves.
• The reason arrives. Net.reject_and_kick sends the refusal, then kicks after REJECT_LINGER: an RPC only leaves on the frame's flush, so kicking in the same call discarded it, and the client's disconnect handler overwrote it anyway. Both are fixed; smoke asserts a refused client reads its reason.
• No small packet buys large work. Character select and create rewrite the whole store, re-place the player and broadcast a roster, so they are paced per peer (ServerRuntime.CONTROL_COOLDOWN_TICKS), and re-selecting the character you hold is a no-op. Item moves and experience grants — the two persistence paths a client can trigger every tick — mark the store dirty, and it is written once per tick at most (CharacterStore.save_deferred / flush).
• The two hot decoders check their bounds. A short or hostile snapshot decodes as valid: false and is dropped; the snapshot channel is unreliable with ENet's checksum off, so this is a network event, not only an attack. Event lengths are declared per type (NetCodec.event_payload_size), and an unknown type stops the stream rather than unaligning everything after it. Both size tables are pinned to their encoders by tests.

Instances

One server process hosts the lobby hub plus every concurrent dungeon. An Instance is a SimWorld and a peer list; messages are addressed to the peers of one instance, so a player never receives traffic for a world they are not in. At ~0.24 ms/tick per instance, the limit is bandwidth and player count long before it is CPU.

Transfers (portal in, escape out, dungeon cleared) are driven by server-only events that NetCodec refuses to serialise, so the decision cannot leak to a client as something it might try to send back.

The listen server

"Host and play" runs a ServerRuntime and a ClientRuntime in one process. The client is peer 1 and goes through the identical code path — it still sends input and still learns outcomes from snapshots. Only the transport is short-circuited, in Net.send_* / Net.send_input, which check for the local peer and call the handler directly instead of going through ENet. No simulation code knows the difference, so a bug cannot hide in a "host-only" branch.

Known gaps

• No lag compensation (see above — deliberate, with a stated escape hatch).
• No snapshot delta compression. Full state at 20 Hz is fine at this actor count; delta-encoding against the last acknowledged snapshot is the next step if enemy counts grow.
• No encryption or authentication. ENetMultiplayerPeer supports DTLS; wire it up before exposing a server to the internet.
• Bullet spawn events are per-bullet. Sending pattern events instead (emitter id + tick + seed, clients regenerate) would cut bullet traffic by roughly the count of each emitter's shot. Worth doing only if bandwidth becomes the binding constraint — it couples the client to emitter behaviour, which the current design deliberately avoids.