Thursday 30 March 2017

Multiplayer Game Development: Step By Step Tutorial

Video games are very popular in the market. Children or adults, irrespective of their ages, love to play video games.  Usually, they come in as a single player activity mode where the player has to play against a few pre-programmed challenges or a multiplayer game mode in which more than one player can play the game. Internet gaming has a strong growth by introducing such multiplayer games. Most of the top rated games on mobile and computers are now multiplayer enabled and it is always interesting to play a multiplayer game. Here we will talk about how to learn multiplayer game development and implement them on a network.

Learn Multiplayer Game Development

Understand the concept of networking

A simple way to connect players in a multiplayer environment is peer to peer architecture. Here, the concept is that two or more nodes (computers, mobiles, etc.) are to be connected to each other without a centralized system and control. Each peer having the same function, they consume the same data and share the same data with other peers.
Once each player establishes the connection with each other, the information is passed through the network to other peer and he is now aware of the decision taken by the opponent.

Benefits of peer to peer system
  • Fast transmission of data
  • Simple system 
  • Reliable to players 

Peer to peer network architecture is very powerful to generate multiplayer games. But javascript enabled games are using client-server architecture networking for game development.

Understand the concept of the game server

The game server is responsible for connecting players from various nodes into a single gaming environment. Game servers are mainly two types:


  • Authoritative game server: In an authoritative game server, the logic of the game is in memory of the server every time. Client report various details to the server through messages and the game server updates the state of the game correspondingly. The server sends back the updated state of the game to all the clients including the original sender.

  • Non-authoritative game server: In a non-authoritative server, the client’s involvement is very high because the client can send updated state of the game to other clients and to the game server at the same time.

Understand the concept of game clients

Game clients act as an interface between the human and the game software. The game client is responsible for collecting the input from the player and also is responsible for receiving various game states from the server. In the world of dynamic multiplayer games, clients are very responsible for dynamic changes happen in the gaming environment.


Challenges in developing Multiplayer games

Multiplayer game development is very expensive. And also it has very high chance of failure. After the development of the game, it will move to the testing phase. The testing phase is very critical in the multiplayer game environment. But the real test occurs when the game come to the live population.

Summary
Developing an online game is very interesting as playing it. We are in the golden era of multiplayer game development. It is an exciting task to learn multiplayer game development with all its challenges. Synchronization and concurrency control are the two important things that a game developer needs to take into consideration. 

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