Although I have previously worked on multiple mobile apps but this is something new to me. After a lot of struggle, I have come up with an architecture which is illustrated with the help of a high-level flow diagram:
We have decided to go with client-server model. There will be a centralized database on server. Each client will have its own local database which will remain in sync with server. This database acts as a cache for storing things that do not change frequently e.g. maps, products, inventory etc.
With this model in place, I am not sure how to tackle following issues:
- What would be the best way of synchronizing server and client databases?
- Should an event get saved to local DB before updating it to server? What if app terminates for some reason before saving changes to centralized DB?
- Will simple HTTP requests serve the purpose of synchronization? _ How to know which users are currently logged in? (One way could be to have client keep on sending a request to server after every x minutes to notify that it is active. Otherwise consider a client inactive).
- Are client side validations enough? If not, how to revert an action if server does not validate something?
Additional Info:
Client-side is implemented in C++ game engine called marmalade. This is a cross platform game engine which means you can run your app on all major mobile OS. We certainly can achieve threading and which is also illustrated in my flow diagram. I am planning to use MySQL for server and SQLite for client.
This is not a turn based game so there is not much interaction with other players. Server will provide a list of online players and you can battle them by clicking battle button and after some animation, result will be announced.
