This week I mainly worked on the player input class we set up to handle the input the player gives to control a champion that is being updated on the server. I also made sure the champion and its GUI is updated correctly for the network.
The setup we chose for our network was to have the mother-instance of all game objects placed on the server, and also mainly updated on the server. Only necessary data like object’s positions and rotations are then sent to all the clients so that the game can be updated visually on each client.
This setup require a light touch though as each player needed to be able to send their input to the server to update the individual champion instance they are controlling, at the same time the server needs to update each individual champion based on that input and then make calls to each client in order to have each champion instance updating one each client connected to the server. An additional call also had to be made from the server back to the owner-player of the champion in order to have their GUI update.
Getting all this to work was very tough for me; not only because the setup is quite complex, but also because the networking syntax is restricted. Trying to set these functions up I ran into many blocks I could only solve after some research of network solutions.
In the end though I feel getting this setup on place may have been worth it, even though it ended up taking far more time than I would have wished. Having this network setup in place means we don’t have to fear that two players end up playing two different versions of the same game due to a miss-sync of the network; as everything essential to the game functionality is run and updated only at the server.
The Game Design Endevour 