Interesting...what happens to the poor sap you're treating if you fail the game a few times? And is all of that online stuff really practical? Sounds a bit server-crushing to me.
Not 100% sure if there will even be player injuries, but they wouldn't be serious in any case. Might be (redshirt) NPC ones, in which case I guess someone might die, or it might just be a "wait a while before starting again" thing. Of course the cash and fame stuff you get from completing a mission is based on your performance, in some way that I'm nowhere near determining yet, but surely more combos will be better.
As for the online stuff being practical--Each move that you make is roughly 15 bytes, without much attempt to compress it. I think I could get this particular puzzle down to 6 bytes per move if I really tried, including all the normal communication headers. It's client-authoritative, to a certain extent...if you say "I'm moving this piece left", it attaches the fact that it's currently at position 4,6, and the server validates that you didn't move it into a wall, and that this piece isn't a higher Y value than your last move, etc. The server doesn't keep track of the fact that it slowly falls over time; if you let a piece drop and don't touch it, then you only send the server one move as it locks into place. (The RNG is synced per-puzzle between client and server, and given a new seed every rolling 20 moves or so while retaining a small buffer; therefore, it's lag-free for the client, and has very low bandwidth to update it.) Now, this is all echoed back to all other clients within possible viewing range of your puzzle console, and they each run client prediction from there for things like piece drop. So if we assume that a very good player sustains an amazing five moves per second, and that ten other players are watching, while I've fully optimized the network protocol: The server handles 30b/s down and 300b/s up. If five godlike players are puzzling in the same room at that rate, while six other players watch, the server handles 150b/s down and 1500b/s up, while each individual player recieves 150b/s down to watch. Yes, it's designed for low bandwidth requirements and operates quite nicely in a high latency environment.
I'm planning a Tetris Attack style competitive game on this engine (maybe under the auspices of a pugle-stick sparring arena). The latency should be more than forgiving enough to play it properly. Hell, for all the players can tell, they might as well be sitting on the couch together if they've even got anything as good as a second of ping on a 4800 baud modem.
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Topic: if self.isCoder(): post() #Programming Thread (Read 902515 times)