50 players isn’t that many, though. Especially if they are zoned properly. I wonder if you will spend more processing time trying to sort out paradoxes in more complicated approaches.
Note that I have a networking library that is supposed to solve these cases:
It’s not really documented at all yet except some source javadoc and there is on known bug for message splitting (that can easily be disabled without much issue). It’s a decent start for real-time high performance physics-based networking. Another game on here is using it already to good effect.
You can see the help I provided in getting it working here:
If nothing else maybe it provides some ideas.
Or I guess this is where I started my ‘tutorial’: