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Asked: 2026-05-13T07:53:10+00:00

I’m writing a 2D space RTS game in C#. Single player works. Now I

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I’m writing a 2D space RTS game in C#. Single player works. Now I want to add some multiplayer functionality. I googled for it and it seems there is only one way to have thousands of units continuously moving without a powerful net connection: send only the commands through the network while running the same simulation at every player.

And now there is a problem the entire engine uses doubles everywhere. And floating point calculations are depends heavily on compiler optimalizations and cpu architecture so it is very hard to keep things syncronized.
And it is not grid based at all, and have a simple phisics engine to move the space-ships (space ships have impulse and angular-momentum…). So recoding the entire stuff to use fixed point would be quite cumbersome (but probably the only solution).

So I have 2 options so far:

  • Say bye to the current code and restart from scratch using integers
  • Make the game LAN only where there is enough bandwidth to have 8 players with thousands of units and sending the positions and orientation etc in (almost) every frame…

So I looking for better opinions, (or even tips on migrating the code to fixed-point without messing everything up…)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Surely all your client will be using the same binary, so compiler optimisations have no effect on synchronisation issues.

    Also, if you are only planning on targeting one architecture (or are at least only allowing people to play against each other if they are on the same architecture) then that doesn’t matter either.

    I’ve done exactly the same thing using floating points in C# developing games for the iPhone and desktop, and they both give the same results, even though the iPhone is ARM and desktop is x86.

    Just make sure the game does exactly the same calculations and you will be fine.

    If all else fails, just replace all instances of float in your game to a standard fixed-point arithmetic class. That way you can be 100% sure that your calculations are deterministic across architectures, although the nature of fixed-point arithmetic may adversely effect your game.

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