What about when we publish the game, wont it need the dll to be distributed with the game for those functions to work? Will we be able to distribute the dll with our commercial games for them to work with it?
You always need the dll, also in the final game! What I ment was that you aren't allowed to distribute the dll itslef.
The functions are prettty self-explanitory, but if you could post the commented lines in english so I can know all the details, I would be very gratefull (and by the looks of it I would probably be even more interested after reading those descriptions, if it is possible to be more interested).
I currently don't have the time to translate the documentation I posted. But the final documentation will be in english and german (it will be a compiled html helpfile, like the gs manual).
Will there be conections by sockets? What is the limit of number of connections? Can the server handle client crashes automatically, or other types of unexpected disconnections? (Timeouts?).
Of course enet uses Sockets. You can set the connection limit when you create a server (enet_init_server). But there will be a limit in the standard version (maybe 16 or 32) and in the pro version it will be unlimited.
Yes it uses timeouts! Currently you aren't able to set them up, but I'll try to implent this too!
Can you send multidimentional arrays or structs?
You can do this already with some tricks. But a real implementation was not done until now.
Also it would be great if the server could work without having to actually load a level, that would be a great feature so the server we program using your plugin could handle multiple maps. (multi-zone support?). Is this feature planned?
The plugin won't make use of any directX function if you only run a server (also no level_load, ...) and yes multi-zone is planned for the pro version!
A lobby system to search for online game sessions to join and chat before you start to play a level would be great.
Planned for Pro!
Is late-join support implemented (when a game is already in progress)?
Yes you can do this! But this has nothing to do with the plugin, but how you program your game
-chat being dealt with easily through a function instead of having to make one yourself like: chat_send(player, STRING*) or chat_send(all, STRING*), etc...
-some automated functions for "teams" support like: add_to_team(player_id, team_id), chat_send(team_id, STRING*), send_pos(player_pos, team_id), etc...
This can easily be done with the implented event system! I will make some examples how easy you can make a chat, teamchat... with the event system!
I don't want to let the plugin "explode" because of ton's of special features wich are only interesting for some people. Instead I want to create a perfect working and flexible basic system, which can be easily used for all situation which come with mp programming
I can do 4 without a plugin, so how do I know that I am not just using the built-in comm package? Brings me no value or demonstrates much of an improvement
^^ You can trust me, I'm using enet not the gs dplay. But if you don't trust me, you can easily test this: Just use a version which don't supports mp (like extra, or lite-c) and you will see, that you still can make use of all pluginfunctions
I'm still thinking about the connection limits...
I would buy it if it's possible to send huge data packes(~10-20kb) without any variable correlation at once.
Why do you want to send so big packets? The only thing I can imagin why you need this is for sending files. There will be a function for sending files in the pro version!
So if i want to send 5 Bytes - there should go 5 Bytes out the same with 5000 byte. Of course there have to be some adressing-header data but I don't want e.g. var_for_name-thing
If you use enet_send_var,_string,_array,... then the name of the variable always will be sent => long name, much more bytes to send. The only thing to avoid this is to implent a function where you can regist a var, array,... so that they get a unique number => only 1-max.4 byte (dependes on how much you regist). I probably will implent this (but other features are currently more important because this is no real problem;the traffic is still low
).
I hope that I have answered all your questions!
Dark_Samurai
