To answer your last post's question, for me personally, I would be most interested in "Event System" and "Multiplayer Entities" as a preview. Not because they are of the most importance but because I believe they could be the most motivating to buy such a book. Not sure what others think though.

As for the other remarks you made, thank you for clearing that up. I didn't realize this was to be one of multiple books, so I was missing the other parts. If the things I mentioned get worked on in other books, then this basic approach is indeed very good. Though on the other hand, we are mostly hobby programmers here. If we got payed for it, we could read loads of books, but as long as we don't get payed, the fastest way to get results is always the most motivating one. If I was only starting into mutliplayer programming, I would want to see a fully working game first and then learn how parts of it work, even with a basic approach like yours, that would be fine. But I hardly have the time to code my game, then I don't want to read 100 pages of a book, even if it saves me time (which I don't know at first).

With all that said, I think if you bring out more books that cover more advanced topics (and hopefully with loads of example scripts, because they are always a good way to learn) this is still a very good project.

I think my subconsciousness tried to get a conversation started because, ya know... reading such good news from fastlane69, reminds me about some of the ol' days. I also assume that my dirty little black-hearted gamedeveloper brain tried to take this opportunity to let me look like a complete d***a** because I tortured it about 2.15 weeks now with dry and absolutely boring stuff about business informatics, so... well, sorry man! I owe you a german beer, a Heineken or 4 cl Lagavulin for my ignorance, your choice :-)

Seriously, I am interested in this. One thing, though - do you answer the following question: "Is my MP traffic absolutely like plain text and do I have to apply my own cryptographic algorithms and prototocols like DHKE, signatures, certificates and symmetric algorithms if I want to protect my traffic??"

Cheers,
-Chris

Hey, no worries mate.. but I sure will take you up on that beer when our paths cross... no doubt!!!! Mmmmmmm.....love that german beer... guess it's in my genes since I have strong german ties.... IN ANY CASE...


To answer your question, your topic is about encryption and to some extent compression. While I mention the GS commands for this in my first book, as it is IMO an advanced topic I will defer this topic to future books.

Consider that while gamers need security, any other number of MP project don't. Hence it's important for me to cover all the things the EVERY MP project will have -- login, sending data, etc -- and then move onto more advanced topics. In principle, that would be a topic for the second book along with registration, security, and other advanced net programming issues.

And the answer is "yes data is in plain text (or binary at worst) unless you turn on encryption in which case". I'd actually never thought about this but a simple packet sniffer would be able to answer unequivocally... or JCL on the boards.

I hear what you're saying Germanunkol. And I know that game developers as a rule are not "instruction readers" and thus 100 pp. may seem like a lot.

But is it really?

Consider that you will be spending at least 2 or 3 months starting on an MP project That's 60-90 days. This means that if you read 1-2 pp a day you will finish the book and have a working network code and have working network knowledge. Or you can use my book as a reference, only reading those parts of the GS engine that trouble you.


Here's that preview for you. EVERY event (solid box) that GS has to offer is listed here along with the Event Handlers (box with two "prongs"). This is also an example of my use of UML to explain the GS engine.

Neat. And those diagrams will also make understanding it a lot simpler than plain text would.
Will you be giving a link to the book-store to conitec? I think if you had it on their "link" site many people would check it out.

On a side note, I find one of the hardest aspects of multiplayer projects the proper disconnection proces... it's weird, but I find that difficult: clearing a player's data on all connected pcs so that a new client could join... sorry. This just came to mind when I read the last posts.

You mean something like this?

Well I certainly didn't mean to write process with one s. But yeah, that's pretty much what I meant, I think. But I mean handling everything that needs to be handled in the event_disconcect. Not the structure of the multiplayer engine is my problem, but tying in all the right values that need to be set/reset if a client leaves. Anyways, since I'm working with ANet, all of this is a little different for me anyways.