Notes from the engine room
How we build deterministic physics, rollback netcode, and the cloud behind Playband.
Joining a match in progress, in a few kilobytes
Late-join used to mean shipping the whole world. With compressed snapshots and reconnect deltas, a player slots into a live match almost for free.
Read morePricing that matches what realtime actually costs
Why we bill on smoothed peak-CCU with a player-hours guard instead of MAU — and how cheap egress lets us undercut the incumbents.
Read moreScaling rooms across regions without touching a server
Matchmaking, fleets and three layers of autoscaling across five regions — so the cloud grows under your game while you ship gameplay.
Read moreDeterministic 3D physics, down to the last bit
Stacking boxes, capsules, joints and split-impulse solving — all in fixed-point, all identical across machines. A look at the 3D core under Playband.
Read morePathfinding that agrees on every client
Navmesh A* with funnel smoothing and ORCA avoidance — running locally on each machine and arriving at the exact same path. No path data on the wire.
Read moreIt should feel like Unity, not like netcode
Components, systems and a source generator that turns plain C# into a deterministic, rollback-ready multiplayer game — with the networking nowhere in sight.
Read moreRollback netcode that just works
Predict locally, reconcile when remote inputs land, and re-simulate the difference invisibly. Here's how Playband makes rollback the default, not a research project.
Read moreWhy realtime multiplayer starts with determinism
Rollback netcode is only as good as the simulation underneath it. Here's why Playband is fixed-point and bit-identical from the first tick.
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