Is your player, and all other animate objects in the game only going to move at one speed? Will you not have a speed buff, or a slow debuff for the players?
No, but I figured I'd just have the server keep track of that. If the player gets some kind of speed buff, the server will know.. it will adjust the speed server-side so when the player requests to move, it uses the current server-side speed.
As this game is really just my own little training project, I realize it will never be flooded with people, much less flooded with people who feel the need to cheat, but I'm trying to incorporate some "best practices" so that when I do work on something legitimate, I'm used to doing it right.
your server should still send a full game state every "so often" (how often can be determine based on how frenetic your game will be, how many players there are, how much traffic there already will be, etc.).
That's gonna be a tough one. I can't imagine more than 10 or so objects will be moving on a player's screen at a time. I've already tried to limit how much traffic is sent to the players by only updating their surroundings rather than the entire game, but it needs more work. I guess this will be a trial + error effort.
This also means you should have time-stamped messages, so clients know, at "this point in time" player X was at Y location, moving at this Z velocity, so you can make sure the player is at the correct state at your clients time.
That.. is interesting. I'm having a little bit of a tough time wrapping my head around that. Why wouldn't I just use NOW as my time? As long as the server is sending the most recent information and the clients are updating with the most recent information, why do I need to check times? I'm not trying to contest you, I just don't understand it. Could you possibly give an example?
Thanks,
Jeremy