How to Sync Non-Players Actions in Multiplayer Games

hi guys ^__^ .

sorry for this late response, ill respond to my question in case someone is having the same question in mind.

so to have this kind of feature in your games there are 2 ways:

1) the cheapest way is to make a client between your players being the authoritative one and drive all NPCs ( Non-Players, bots ) but this way your game will be open to cheating and the authoritative client will be the server, that means he will be favored by the network latency ...

2) using a headless authoritative instance of your game as a serve and run it within your pc or vps this way is secured and all your players will have 0 authority, they will not be able to see other players Ip Addresses and you have 100% control over your game logic. ( for production releases you wil certainly need to rent a VPS or a dedicated machine ).

to handle 1000s of NPCs you will need to think in a specific logic which is not updating all the NPCs every Tick update, but each NPC have to be driven by a certain logic that is executed in server & client side like NavMesh in unity, and updating only the NPCs that changed their behaviour ( the focused player or destination ) .

Good luck Guys!