I'm really adding too much stuff in each day to list it all in the journal...but multiplayer is coming along very nicely. It looks like I've got solutions to most of the problems I will encounter implementing multiplayer into my game.
There are bascly two reasons for this:
- RakNet, the networking library I'm using for this allows me to focus on actually getting multiplayer functionality into the game...not writing a solid UDP library from scratch. Mad respect to these guys...they rock.
- Only 6 players/gangs in a server at a time. The fact that there are 6 gangs/players (max) per city saved my ass. I don't think it would be possible to sync all the traffic/civilians/gangsters if there were 16 clients in a server..it would be a heavy undertaking.
I'm not saying my job is easy now...I've still got to do some tricks to make it all work...but things could be a lot worse :-)
Ehh...I made this earlier today...I think it looks kinda cool:
Here's a screenshot of a test earlier today, I've yanked out traffic/civilians so I can focus on getting all the gangsters in sync on all client machines:
Here's what the lobby is looking like these days...I've still got a little re-arranging to do, I'm not 100% satisfied with the layout of this window.
I've got the chat system in place, it's rock solid. I've also completed the network message pumps for the client and server, everything is rock solid...I'm very excited. I havn't had a single problem with it yet, though I'm just testing it on the LAN :p
I've also got a notification system, player enter/leave messages, as well as a basic vote kick & map change voting system.
My servers are a sort of hybrid between standard real-time-strategy game servers (that force you to play the game when you host it), and deticated first person shooter servers (counter-strike, half-life, quake, etc.).
My game servers are deticated, which means that they don't require that a player is present for them to be running. They also stay up through infinate coming/goings of players. As far as I know, no RTS games use this type of server setup, though I hope somebody will tell me about one so I can check it out.
Today I had some random bot show up on my FORUM. His name is "horn981". Apparently there are bots out there that register on your forum and post random responses to topics. So what do they get out of it? They put links to shady, ad-ridden, poker/casino sites in the bot's signature. One thing is for certain...horn rocks.
- Dan
