6. Sparse Saving

In this page, I will briefly explain what the sparse saving feature does and when you should consider using it.

How things were before

If you were using GGRS before 0.4.1, updating, loading and saving the game state would occur exactly as often as they would in GGPO. Loading is done once per rollback, but saving is done after every update step. This is how a rollback looks like in GGPO:

[LOAD]
[UPDATE]
[SAVE]
[UPDATE]
[SAVE]
[UPDATE]
[SAVE]

By keeping a full history of gamestates, GGPO can always load the most recent and correct state. You could say that GGPO minimizes update steps.

Saving and Loading Game State

Depending on your application, saving and loading the game state can look wildly different, but one often used technique is serialization, for example with Rust's popular serde. In fact, GGRS's own examples use serde and bincode in order to save and load the gamestate. While very convenient, this usually results in long computation times when saving multiple times in a single step, as in a rollback shown above.

Sparse Saving Mode

As a solution, GGRS offers a sparse saving mode for P2PSession. It is easily enabled before starting the session.

sess.set_sparse_saving(true)?;

That's it. You don't need to change anything else in your code. When in sparse saving mode, GGRS minimizes save requests at the cost of additional update steps.

This works by only ever saving the latest confirmed frame, for which we have received and confirmed input from all clients. This state is guaranteed to be correct and can be used as a loading point for every rollback. If no natural rollbacks occur (due to all predictions being correct or all inputs arriving on time), we sometimes might need to artificially induce a rollback in order to resimulate the last confirmed state and save it.

With sparse saving, GGRS guarantees to save at most once per update tick, at the cost of potentially longer rollback sequences.

Conclusion

Depending on your application, the sparse saving mode might be beneficial for you. Just enable sparse saving and give it a try! If it made any difference for you, let me know!