The server and client are completely separate programs that just happen to connect to each other. The only time the server knows about any of the clients is when they successfully make a connection, which only needs an IP address and a socket number.It's not real time I guess, that's what I was meaning.
It feels weird. You could make several different client programs connect to the server, even if each one is doing something completely different from the rest.
You could end up connecting completely different clients, one that's trying to play the game and another that could be sending random messages.
Yeah I remember how weird it was learning about networking. Back in 2013 when VizionEck was still a PC game I was setting up multiplayer and it kinda shocked me how "fake" it is. I just kinda assumed multiplayer games would run on all systems as a shared program of sorts, instead of each system running a unique version of the game for that player. Like it blew my mind that one player they could see everyone as cubes yet the other player could see everyone as spheres by just building the executables separately.
I watched a GDC talk about light field rendering and it really made me nostalgic for my old work. ~10 years ago when I was building my light field displays I didn't know a thing about programing and actually rendered my first light fields manually over the course of a few weeks. Then I eventually set up an animation in Blender that could render the lightfield piece by piece as a video and then I'd composite every frame together. You have no idea how happy I was to be able to set up a light field within half an hour!
Nowadays it'd be almost trivial to setup Unity to run in real time on one of my light field displays.
