Multiplayer Server in Progress

[noriaf]

Hello there!

First off I wanted to thanks to everyone who is contributing to this project. I have a lot of fun with it and I wanted to do something to show my gratitude.

I use to play the game on android and I was thinking that it would be awesome if I could play with friends. The biggest problem is that the approach of peer to peer is not really suitable for mobiles so instead of whining to the people who already are doing a great job in their free time, to make/fix the multiplayer mode , I decided to give it a try.

There is a lot of stuff to do, the game indeed is with peer to peer in mind, and the multiplayer have a lot of issues ( oh netty! ), but well here we go.

I have attached a video showing the lobby screen with two clients and a lightweight server.


Thanks all of you guys...

[Xitax]

I really hate to rain on anyone's head, but please don't do this. If Forge is going to support PTP, then it should be without any external server. I feel this is an area where we as a community need to tread carefully to avoid attention and any reproduction of MTGO.

I'm not against PTP totally though. PTP can be supported by individual IP connection on PC - for handheld devices I'm not sure. Although right now we don't have any developers working on it.

[noriaf]

Sorry, I didn't want to cause any troubles... I will drop the idea then. I though having an external server would have given flexibility for cross platforms games, but you are right, the last think I want is this project to be shutted down.

Thank.

[churrufli]

It's not a trouble if is in PTP mode, without servers, a big part of this community wanna see online working.

[Max mtg]

I really hate to rain on anyone's head, but please don't do this. If Forge is going to support PTP, then it should be without any external server. I feel this is an area where we as a community need to tread carefully to avoid attention and any reproduction of MTGO.

I'm not against PTP totally though. PTP can be supported by individual IP connection on PC - for handheld devices I'm not sure. Although right now we don't have any developers working on it.

Why do you negate any external server?
There are games that can run both local server and be played on an external one, such as Quake or Counter-strike (the original one at least).
Forge may follow the same path. In multiplayer menu you may host a game, join one or connect to a server where your game will be publically visible.

As I understand, the harderst problem for now is to transfer game state to a remote client. In a perfect implementation scenario the client receives only a snapshot of the game state with the information it's allowed to know: the public information and that player's private one, plus the action it's expected to perform. AFAIR, the currently engineered client works directly with Game object instance, so you have to develop classes and switch the client(s?) to use those.
Should one take a different path and send the whole game state from one client to another, there emerges heavy traffic, cheating, and probably desync.

[timmermac]

We want to try and avoid drawing official attention to Forge, and having an external server for multiplayer matches complicates that aim significantly.

[Max mtg]

We want to try and avoid drawing official attention to Forge, and having an external server for multiplayer matches complicates that aim significantly.

The officials are already aware. (Since wotc has recently filed a claim regarding their Beleren fonts being published on this forum - viewtopic.php?f=52&t=20378 - they do know of this forum and have definitelly seen which projects are being developed here). They seem not to care as long as a project does not steal users from their paid services.

Looking at XMage example, their having an external server has not yet caused too much attention.

[TeoSkrn]

There are lots of magic engines around the internet that support multiplayer, some of them are even multiplayer only, and they have no problem about that.
I don't think that forge will be shut down if we keep the multiplayer some kind of limited.