Game networking for a slow strategy game

Short summary

A detailed technical post on networking architecture for Old Light, a multiplayer browser strategy game where correctness over long time spans matters more than latency. The protocol uses a single world.init snapshot followed by world.delta patches over WebSocket, with server-time clock synchronization. The author covers subtle bugs like double-counting resource income from stale anchor timestamps and ensuring builds complete even when players are offline.

• •Old Light uses a simple WebSocket protocol: one init snapshot then delta patches, no interpolation needed
• •Server-time clock sync prevents client clock drift from corrupting time-based calculations
• •Subtle resource projection bugs can ship unnoticed in slow games because they only manifest across hours

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