How should I do this?

Luciano Ramalho luciano at hiper.com.br
Mon Jun 17 21:55:12 EDT 2002


First of all, I must say I am also a big fan of European-style strategy 
games (with some American favourites as well). I don´t have a whole lot 
of free time, but I would be willing to collaborate with you in such a 
project. You can write me in pvt.

I have done some network programming. In my experience, adopting a 
peer-to-peer architecture considerably complicates things. Even if only 
two computers are involved, and both run the same program, it´s much 
easier to think about the dialog as a client-server conversation, in 
which the client is simply the side that initiates the communication. 
And after the client and server roles are established by the initial 
connection, both sides should stick to their roles. This arrangement 
simplifies everything, and is adequate for a board game which doesn´t 
need real-time liveliness (the client can ask the server for updates 
every few seconds, so there is no real need for the server to "push", 
which would require the reversal of roles).

As far as finding out about other players and their addresses, the 
standard solution to that is to have a "matchmaker" service running on a 
central server.

I hope this helps...

Luciano Ramalho

rodneys at io.com wrote:
> I have a project that I'd like to attempt in Rev, but I don't know whether 
> or no what I want to do is currently possible. So, I'm looking for 
> pointers/suggestions.
> 
> I am a big fan of strategy board games (mostly German ones such as 
> Settlers of Catan) and would like to create a program to play such games 
> live online with other players. Most of this is fairly straightforward, 
> though it will take a lot of work.
> 
> However, what I don't know how to do is have the programs on different 
> computers communicate with each other. The obvious choice would seem to be 
> sockets. The downside to this is that I have to have the users enter the 
> IP addresses that they want to connect to. Then, I have to manually send 
> the info to all addresses since there doesn't seem to be any way to 
> broadcast to all open sockets. Am I wrong about this?
> 
> Also, the users need to be able to send messages to each other, both 
> private and public. A built-in instant messaging type client would be 
> ideal for this. It might even allow me to send all data in that way since 
> I could broadcast it. Is anyone working on such a thing? Especially nice 
> would be the fact that people could just open the program and look to see 
> if anyone is online looking for players. There isn't an easy way to do 
> this with sockets as far as I can tell. It would be nice to be able to tap 
> into an existing network, such as ICQ.
> 
> This is not a commercial application, so I can't afford to pay someone to 
> write the IM portion. I could make a one-time purchase of a reasonable 
> library, but it would need to be cross-platform, so I really prefer 
> built-in features. Is this something coming in the not too distant future?
> 
> Any pointers in the right direction or other suggestions would be 
> appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -Rodney
> 
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