I am doing a multiplayer online bomberman clone. Its in java but im using OpenGL for graphics. Obviously the game code isnt that hard and I can get that up and running not a problem (for single player). Now I want to make it so you can play against others over the net (up to 8 people per game). I wanted to do so players could create servers and join games similar to counter strike et al. Now I was going to have a MySQL database hold a list of all currently running servers, so when a user creates a server on thier machine it checks the db and updates it. Also when a player wants to join a game it gets a list of all servers open. I got a free webhost and it has mysql, but it doesnt support java. I dont know much about web side of things so would be greatful if someone could tell me a host with mysql that does support java, or give me another method or idea on how to do this. Also I am new to network programming (can work out how to connect to computers etc from tutorials) and so I was wondering if anyone could give me tips on designing the game main run code for incorporating multi player. Thanks. [Edited by - JinJo on October 20, 2006 10:23:49 AM]

You might want to head over to the Network & Multiplayer Gaming forum with this one.

A master server generally needs to be more complex than just a database (it needs to check that the servers in its list are still active and so on), but you could certainly prototype it that way (with a HTTP interface, through PHP I imagine if you're on a mySQL host, that individual servers use to notify the master of their status changes).

I think Counterstrike et al let players start their own servers, so you wouldn't necessarily need to host a permanent game yourself. You'd need a mechanism for 'trusted hosts' to get their games listed on the master server (otherwise no-one could see them), but the master server wouldn't need Java to do that. If you want to host a game server yourself, and you probably do, you just need a host that will let you run the server program – you don't need mySQL on the game server.

(Btw the server doesn't have to be in Java just because the client is, though it does make data structure reuse easier.)