what is a game snapshot

Hello to all,
i have been reading a lot this word lately in multiplayer games.

what’s exactly the SNAPSHOT, the game state in certain frame of the game? or is something else?

thanks in advance…

You are correct, it is the state of the game at X tick of the simulation. Multiplayer games use multiple snapshots to compensate for latency.

Yes, generally a snapshot would mean the full game state in a certain frame, or perhaps more exactly concerning multiplayer games, a blob of the required data for the client to render a full scene.

Not necessarily tied to the FPS, however, as even high action packed multiplayer game servers rarely need to send snapshots 60 a second - but the client can render at 60 FPS by simulation and prediction based on the snapshots it’s received.

What I did in my server is only send what is needed. Store some update flags in your Player.

I have a lobby/room system.

loop through all players
-if player is in room, loop through all players in room and see if they have updated their state(via update flags)
-if they did, send their new state to the player we’re looping for.

its basically to update in all the clients only the object that has been updated by some client, right?
but that concern the bullets, enemies HUD as well, does not?, i mean those are always updading…

what i ment is, don’t send a packet if it doesnt have to be sent. This way you save processing power and bandwidth. Also depends on how many connections you’ll have.
if its a small game, you shouldn’t worry to much