Ghost field changes event from server

[summer field]

Can I, for optimization purposes, receive a change event in GhostField on a static ghost rather than receive it every tick on the client systems?
I understand that this can generally be done via RPС, but ghost fields seem more relevant.

[empty thorn]

Not very clear what you mean with " than receive it every tick on the client systems?" What are we comparing here? RPCs? Synced ghost fields?

[summer field]

I mean, how do I know on the client that ghostfield has changed?

[empty thorn]

You can keep a local tracker & sync value to track. E.g. counter or networkTick

[summer field]

do you mean that I need to create a local variable that is a cache of the previous value of the field?

[empty thorn]

Correct

You could probably also try use ChangeFilters, but that might give you false positives.

[summer field]

oh, thanks, now I do the same, due to the local cache, however, this does not eliminate unnecessary iterations on entities

[empty thorn]

Try query with change filter on the component.

[summer field]

i will try, but as you say, this might give false positives, so is it worth it?

[empty thorn]

Simply combine them

It's easy to test

[summer field]

well, I didn't think about it, thanks again, you're helping me out

[boreal hill]

no you can't, you have to track value changes on your own if you need that. Change filter is one way to broadphase those

[summer field]

hmm i'm a bit confused then, so can i use change filter to track ghost field changes or not?)

[boreal hill]

change filters are per chunk

so 1 entity out of 128 changed here - all entities get triggered on change filter

[summer field]

oh, well yes, it seems to be a problem, well, it turns out that the only way to optimize the logic is to check the ghost field in runtime and compare it with the cached local variable of the ghost component?

[boreal hill]

kinda

most of the time this doesn't actually optimize btw

ECS usually is not working well with reactive patterns

[summer field]

but systems that are triggered by a change in the ghost field can potentially have heavy logic and the ability to not process it every frame, this is optimization, isn't it?

[boreal hill]

well, it depends

either way

serialization on server side works exactly like this

tracks change filters as broadphase

and then does field comparison

field by field

finds out which ghost fields changed, and serializes them for networking

and it's fairly performant (but super complicate to implement)

[summer field]

yep, and this is crutch

[strong hull]

static ghost's ghostfields aren't supposed to be included in any snapshots after the first one unless a field changes i thought? It was my understandind that static didn't mean never changes