Notes on the rollback netcode stack

Mobile rollback in 2026 is a different beast than rollback on PC in 2018. Cellular jitter is worse, frame-pacing on mid-range Android phones is unpredictable, and our prediction window has to handle that without making the game look like a slideshow.

Our current implementation: 8-frame prediction window, with a graceful degradation path down to 4 frames on connections with high jitter variance. We hide the resync via animation-blending — when a player gets corrected, the character lerps to the corrected position over 2 frames instead of snapping.

It’s not perfect yet. The corner case we’re still hunting: a defender whose connection drops to 4-frame mid-combo. The attacker on a clean connection extends the combo into rollback-resync territory, and the defender sees a teleport. Working on a smarter blend that handles mid-combo corrections more gracefully.