I am creating a game for quite long now, but at the moment it's all just singleplayer. From the beginning I wanted to make a multiplayer game of it, and now that I am quite into everything and many things already work, it's time to start this.
I already looked into the networking forums and I found, that even a P2P-based game needs some sort of server.
My questions:
Is it realistic that one of the players participating in a match can be a server or would this be too much for that player's machine (running both the game and the "server")?
If thats not possible, are there any servers one can run a multiplayer-game on, that are free? I don't want to spend a monthly fee on my (stupid :D) little hobby, so renting (or even buying) a server is out of question for me
Well dependog for what you use the server. If you just use it as a master server so the clients find each other a free website might even work (for example the clonk rage masterserver is a php script, lol)
@Core-Dump: Thats what I thought, too. I also like the idea of a list of current available games, and as a whole I would like to have something like the battle.net (of course not THAT big :D) with some basic functionallity like creating and finding games.
So I need a central-server that is for free. I don't want to make it as a website (like quakelive) but to make as a ingame-menu (like battle.net). Is this possible? Are there free servers where you can do such a thing?
Reread my post, i never said it needs to be external, you can just download the data from whatever websource it is, including a php script on a free hoster, and then parse it and display the data as a menu. In this case html is just the protocol used to transfer the data, cause there are many free web services with php.
Reread my post, i never said it needs to be external, you can just download the data from whatever websource it is, including a php script on a free hoster, and then parse it and display the data as a menu. In this case html is just the protocol used to transfer the data, cause there are many free web services with php.
Sorry, looks like I missunderstood your first post.
That should work, fortunately I am a bit used to PHP and HTML. Now that I know that it can be done I only have to get into JGN, so I just have to begin walking through tutorials ;)
thx for your answers!
bye
I never use that, but I know it’s a professional and open source java server for multiplayer games …
Else it’s easy in java, just create a socketserver, with one thread for each connection. Next you will need to define a protocol for exchanging informations on TCP.
Remote procedure call can be another solution for exchanging informations, but it’s hard to use.
I am currently working on a project called Open Game Finder which is intended to be an open source variant of Battle.net. Nowhere near finished though but I’m hopefull to have a first alpha version ready in a week or two. You could start integrating it right now off course, but all that’s really in there at the moment is a login / registration screen.
The OGF uses JME3 and Nifty, but since I’m using a messaging / plugin architecture, you should be able to replace NIFTY with the GUI of your choice easy enough. That the general idea behind the architecture at least.
Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll set you up with the svn location and give you access to the trac so you can file bug reports etc.
Thanks for your response ractoc, but I’m kinda stuck with jme2 (because of FengGUI and a lot of other things). So I guess there is no way to integrate my game with your OGF, right? At the moment I’m trying to use a simple PHP script with an MySQL DB on a free hosting service to register games centrally, but I’m having trouble with routing. I’m currently unable to figure out how to connect to another PC in my household via the internet (by LAN it works fine). I’m using JGN, any ideas how this could work? ^^
might be a bit more work, but it should be possible. That was the whole idea about using the bessage / plugin architecture. You should be able to replace those plugins that you need to replace to integrate the OGF into your game. As long as you keep using the same PluginMessages, the other plugins should have no problem communicating with you own custom plugins.
I’ll be online tonight if you want, we can discuss this more personally on MSN. Much easier to explain things and answer questions that way.
