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Overwatch Gameplay Architecture and Netcode

GDC Festival of Gaming · 195.7K views · 2019-02-08 · 1:04:04

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Overview

Blizzard's Timothy Ford explains in this 2017 GDC session how Overwatch uses an Entity Component System architecture for layered gameplay. He also covers its server-authoritative netcode with client-side prediction and how they keep the game responsive and fair.

On Hacker News

HN treats it as the best real-world AAA example of ECS and game netcode, and cites it constantly in discussions of data-oriented design.

Recommended by 16 HN people across 10 months · HN mentions 2019–2025

Topics

Game programming & enginesSoftware architecture & design
Search by tags
entity component systemnetcodeoverwatchclient predictiongdcdata-oriented design

What people said

bcrosby95 · 2023-12 · Strong recommendation

There's an awesome talk by someone in the overwatch team in youtube. It's about ECS but it has a big section on networking that had some useful tips. Edit: here it is - [VIDEO]

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adampk · 2021-09 · Strong recommendation

[VIDEO] "In this 2017 GDC session, Blizzard's Timothy Ford explains how Overwatch uses the Entity Component System (ECS) architecture to create a rich variety of layered gameplay." (My favorite resource to explain ECS + NetCode)

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Bekwnn · 2021-06 · Strong recommendation

> The components on the entity define not only it's data but also it's behavior by the set of systems that act on the corresponding components. And you can take these object definitions and inherit them to add additional behavior or change the existing behavior by adding more components to the new definition. This seems to miss what ECS actually is, unless you're just referring to the old-school way of doing entity components and not the data-oriented way. Data-oriented ECS way of doing things is to separate state and behaviour. Entity components essentially become structs where their only behaviour is potentially some getter/setter utilities. Behaviours are then state-less systems (just functions, essentially) which act on a set of components. For example, a PhysicsUpdateBehaviour might take in a RigidBodyComponent and a HealthComponent to perform a physics update and apply physics/fall based damage. The main benefit of ECS (imo) isn't even really performance. It makes code in complicated game projects much easier to manage by clarifying the game loop and by making it much more obvious how and when entity state is being modified. It's the kind of thing that potentially complicates a smaller project, but makes larger more complex projects easier to manage. This Overwatch GDC talk is the best breakdown/example of data-oriented ECS in a AAA game that I know of: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by GDC Festival of Gaming, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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