Networking game group?

1

I’ve found what appears to be a decent tutorial on the networking side of things, It’s just like playing with sockets without all the low level muff.

However, where is the port setting? The examples I’ve found have send/receive and update examples, but none of them connect to an IP, or port, or server. Could someone please point me in the right direction for this bit?

Thanks.

2

Sorry, just realised if I search for the right terms I get the responses I expected!

However, I’m still unsure of the port/server side of things. I’m Not developing for xbox so (as far as I can work out) the Lindgren thing isn’t any good for me.

Alternatives alternatives!! I saw Photon mentioned somewhere so I’ve signed up and waiting for my email, but I will at some point need some code to use it!

The first thing I want to test with is a simple Players vs Meteors kind of thing, so could be pretty fast paced. I’m wanting to simplify it as much as possible, I see posts about people sending Pad States, blow that! I only want to send position, rotation, missile fired, etc. Of course I’ll have to play about with this as I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing haha!

What do you folks use and do you have any advice before I get started?

One last thing, while I’m developing, how would you go about distributing the test exe? I’m starting with testing on the LAN but want to test LAN as well.

Thanks lovely people.

3

With Lindgren, which is a good choice by the way, you’ll have to write your own server. Which is great since maybe you’d want it to do some calculations…
Here are some great articles https://github.com/UnterrainerInformatik/GameDevelopmentLinks
Look for the heading networking. Hope that helps.

If you’d like to connect your clients with a single chosen client that represents the server for the duration of a level:
Basically you’ll have to do some steps:

  1. Find mates to play with
  2. Choose one as the server and connect them to that client (NAT-puchthrough)
  3. Send messages about the input to the ‘server’ (you’ve just chosen)
  4. Send messages about the outcome to the clients
  5. Sometimes synchronize your model since it tends to diverge after some time

For steps 1 and 2 you’ll need a real server, or you’ll do it over LAN and broadcast.
There maybe production-ready servers (in the cloud) out there you may rent sparing you the server-programming part, but I don’t know much about those.
Sorry.

If you*d like to keep a server, which may make sense in some circumstances, despite the higher costs, like in order to mitigate cheating, then you’d have to roll your own anyway, but you may skip the NAT-punchthrough stuff.

4

Hi

As Throbax says, Lindgren is a very good choice to use for networking. This is the one I looked at when I was playing around with a server/client sort of setup a while ago.

This link might be of help to you:

and of course the Lidgren github has samples:

5

I will add those to my linklist as soon as I get home.

6

Here is a link to a video play list (14 parts), in the description in each one there is a download link. Been a while since I watched them, but they might help.

7

I’d start here if it was me:

8

I hope this is useful in some way…