Predictive Dead Reckoning for Online Peer-to-Peer Games

Abstract

In online peer-to-peer games, players send periodic updates to each other and each player must locally reconstruct the position of their opponents in between these updates. In scenarios where players are driving cars, high speeds produce more pronounced errors in local replication of online opponents. In this work, we propose a new method of replicating opponents with less data sent and up to 45% less error compared to the state-of-the-art. We use a neural network-based approach to predict an opponent's position, combined with a path tracking controller from the field of mobile robotics, to produce smooth, believable trajectories for opponents' vehicles. We also propose a neural network-based approach to predict a replicated opponent's trajectory following a collision with a static obstacle.