Let's say I have an open world game that supports multiple players.
The game stores their positioning by X and Y in this world.
Also, whoever is playing the game can see a canvas of 11x11, where his player-self is represented on this screen, always centered.
The game world has 1000x1000 squares to walk using keys.
What I know is that:
I could emit events whenever a player walks,
check this event data at the server-side (to see if it is possible and the speed is correct/anti-cheating measures),
update the game state which contains all players and positioning,
re-emit this state from the server so every client would be able to render properly this new player.
The problem is, should I really update someone who isn't even being seen?
When everyone is walking around, moving items, earning levels, etc - those events are being emitted from the client, and that's okay, but thinking about the server-side, it will re-emit that for each update state, and, maybe that will be overloaded?
Also, sending the whole game state, even if it isn't being rendered, opens so many breaches to cheating that this made me think that there is another option.
I'm a beginner at Networking and Game Development, and that is being hard to get into my mind - so I decided to try and put it into a question. This way, maybe with someone reading what I'm thinking about, I might get some clarification. Perhaps I'm just thinking about it the wrong way.
Q: should I really update someone who isn't even being seen?
There is no need.
The normal way MMORPG games do in the server side is to cyclely process network packages and some other calculations like the connection of players like skill cast or something else.
The central of a server may look like below
void run()
{
while (true)
{
processNetwork();
processSkills();
processMoves();
...
}
}
The loop will run several times a second, like 20 frames a second is enough cause players can not feel the little frame, they think they move/play smoothly but the trueth is not.
For your question, player only need to see some little area, when he moves, the server will braodcast his postion to others in the area and the players in his area in the next frame.
And that is just the simpliest model, actual model will be more complicated and we will detach different functions of the game to different server, sucn as chat server, battle server, auction server and others.
Related
I am a beginner gamedev and trying to figure out how to go about implementing my game's inventory management system. I am developing a third person RPG, with heavy emphasis on inventory and crafting, and so it needs to be done right.
I essentially have a tablet device the player will be able to use to access statistics about themselves and should also be their method of ascertaining crafting recipe. An example scenario is as follows: player obtains three recipe items, Apple, Leaf, and Ash. They want to craft a healing poultice in the field. They remove their backpack, which serves as both inventory and a less powerful crafting station, and the camera moves to focus on the backpack as if it were an inventory screen, allowing the player to arrange their ingredients as necessary and then craft.
My problem is I haven't figured out how to manage the control switch. Ideally the player shouldn't be able to walk around and do normal traversal while crafting. Indeed having WASD usable as menu manipulation controls would be preferable. The game is of the type that realtime usage of inventory is part of the experience, so I dont want a static pause screen. What avenue do I need to pursue in my research for this?
I've looked into Cinemachine and state switching/statemachines but I'm still fairly puzzled by that whole affair. I can switch to a state so far, but only sometimes get out of it. I'm away from my computer at the moment so I don't have an example but this concept has been nagging me for hours.
im making a multiplayer FPS game, and I have pretty much all the networking done and working. The issue is, that photon is syncing to players local movement, but if u have a bad connection, you could not tell it is happening cause player send late updates to the server and you can see other players lagging but you can move free and smoothly.
Im aware a lot of games work this way but i also know there are games like medal of honor that your player get stock in the last place every one else saw you. I need to know how to implement this on my game, because gameplay depends on it.
What you describe is "local prediction" of actions / movement.
If I understand this right, you want clients to not act or move if there wasn't a confirmation? If so, you'd need an authoritative host or server. You'd always wait for a confirmation from the host to move the player in any way.
But .. this is not going to work well. Players will feel the lag very much and this is annoying.
You probably want to predict the movement, then correct the local situation if the server disagrees.
I would recommend using Fusion instead of PUN for shooters. It can be run with host and has a nice API to reconcile the actual state from prediction to what the host simulated.
What I'm trying to make
Hi, game development newbie here. The game I am trying to make is fairly simple. It's almost exactly like the old FC game "Ballon Fight" except that I'm trying to make it online where players can go through a match making to find opponents.
BalloonFight:
What I Read
I have read some articles, and found most of them lead to two approaches:
Put all game logic on the client, and the client sends player inputs to server on every frame update. The server acts like a dispatcher which only makes sure player A's input is received by both client A and B. My understanding is that if we see the client in this case as a pure function, and if the two players' inputs are received by each other, the game should produce same results on both clients. Thus synchronization is achieved.
Put all game logic on the server, and let the server do the calculations and send back results to both clients. In this case, clients only worry about displaying.
My Fears
Solution 1 sounded like a simpler one to me, but immediately I realized when network problem is put into account, it becomes incredibly complicated. Losing player A's connection for a few seconds means all the input is lost in that period. What I can guess is, to counter that, the server has to detect whether player A is lagged out and accumulate input from player B until player A is back then feed all the accumulated input to player A's client. Player A's client then need to do a fast forward to catch up. This sounds like there's huge amount of infra work on both client side and server side.
Solution 2 on the other hand looks very daunting to me, since for now I have only written some games on the client side.
My questions
in order to make a simple online game like this, what is the most beginner friendly way to synchronize game state?
if I were to use solution 1 stated above, is there any framework that provides such infra so that I don't have to handle network issues all by myself?
In advance, thank you game dev gurus.
What's the approach that should I use to develop an API that receives two moves and return a result (win/lose/draw)?
Scattegories game
Example:
Animal that starts with letter L
Player 1 - move: Lion
Player 2 - move: Lyon
thegame.com/api/v1/game/1/player/1/move/1
thegame.com/api/v1/game/1/player/2/move/1
How return the result to the players?
Should object player wait for the response or ask result?
What's the best way to develop an API with a callback?
Any other way to resolve this kind of problem?
Thanks.
Plurals are a bit more common, ie:
thegame.com/api/v1/games/1/players/1/moves/1
I think it's probably more logical for moves to be directly under the game, independent of players:
thegame.com/api/v1/games/1/moves/1
where each move has an associated player who made the move. This would make it easy to re-run all moves and understand the game history.
For players, their canonical URL would be independent of games
thegame.com/api/v1/players/1
You can still have a way to access all games for a player and all players for a game, if you like
thegame.com/api/v1/players/1/games
thegame.com/api/v1/games/1/players
Assuming this is a 2 (or more) player game with humans waiting on each other, you could probably make each client poll the game every few seconds. e.g. if a client has made the latest move, it starts polling the URL thegame.com/api/v1/games/1?moves_since=123456. This returns a list of all moves since the timestamp 123456. The timestamp could be the time the last move was made by this user. Once it returns a valid move, the client shows that to the user and waits for them to make their own move. If there are several players, the "game" resource could include a field like "nextMover" to indicate which player is next to make a move.
A more modern way would be to use something like Websockets so the client gets an immediate push from the server when changes occur. It's mostly a similar design but server immediately notifies all clients of updates instead of clients polling.
I'm new to iOS (although I do have a lot of C++ experience) and I am working on a turn-based card game using gamecenter. Here's the catch - The player who's turn it is is the judge and waits for all OTHER players to play a card before the turn is over. Is there a way to do this in Game Center, so all players chose what to do simultaneously and once all have done so, the judge is notified, makes a decision, and then passes priority to the next player? For example, say we start turn 1. I ask the question, #"What is your favorite color?" to all players passing them a gamestate which has that as the question and them not having answered it. Then you respond, #"Green", and our friend Steve responds #"Blue". I then decide which is better, give one of you a point, and then whoever I gave the point becomes the new judge. My question is, how do I allow all players to respond simultaneously, rather than sequentially. I know that, worst case, I could sequentially loop around through players until it comes back to me, then judge it, but this would slow down my game and make it less fun. Is there a way to do this simultaneously?
I agree with NSSplendid about the API for turnbased games requiring sequential turns. The only truly simultaneous method would be using the real-time matches from GKMatch, and that isn't really an option for games with more than a few players.
However, the sequential version could be improved slightly by using a programmatic approach to game center instead of the default view controller.
Ending a turn fires off a push notification through Game Center, and by using GKTurnBasedEventHandler's method handleTurnEventForMatch:didBecomeActive:, you can receive that in your app. When the judge asks the question, have the users display that as part of the game, and have their responses stored locally until their turn. Once it becomes a given player's turn, they receive the notification, even with the app in the background.
In the method, it can check the locally stored answer and end the turn immediately, if they've answered. If they haven't, send the turn once the answer is complete. It's not truly simultaneous, but the judge gets the answers as soon as everyone has responded, without the players having to wait for one player to finish before they can enter their own answers.
The players won't get the notification that the judge has ended their turn until they open the app, but they can't see the question anyways without doing that. Another approach to this, though slightly wasteful, is after the judge ends their turn with their question, is to do a runthrough of all the players ending their turn as soon as they get the "Your turn" notification, so everyone knows a question has been asked, then doing the steps from the previous two paragraphs.
The iOS API is built around the model of sequential turns. While the workaround you mentioned will work, there is no way to get GC to do real concurrent turns. Sorry ):