Communication with other devices

ar2rsawseen · February 2012

Hello,

Since Gideros is more for games, I guess it would make sense to ease up multiplayer game development. So question, is there something on the road map, something planned for multiplayer games. Like one on one mobile games, or one phone hosts game and other devices connect to it.

From other platform experience (I've done it through sockets, and my knowledge in networking is quite limited) it was quite a pain. So it would be really great to have more abstraction, you know, easy function to discover all devices in LAN, establish connections, etc.

And I'm not talking about GameCenter, or BonJour, cause their platform specific. It would be great to have something crossplatform.

So any plans/ideas?

Maybe something usable already, since I see Gideros player has a great communication in Local WiFi.
BTW: Does Gideros player broadcast all the time, for computer to discover it? How does it really work, it would be a great insight where to start.

MikeHart · February 2012

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atilim · February 2012

Hi ar2rsawseen,

We're planning to add raw sockets through an easy interface. But it's still hard to implement a good p2p gaming network system. (It can involve some hard to use techniques like NAT Traversal, UDP hole punching, etc)

About the connection between Player and Studio: Player is the server and Studio tries to connect it on every 0.5 seconds through given IP address (on port 15000). It's a simple system and doesn't include broadcasting.

OZApps · February 2012

so currently there is no require "sockets", right?

ar2rsawseen · February 2012

Hard to sue technics, exactly. That's why I was looking for an easy ways

Well, guess I will use central server through http right now. Because do not really want to go back to raw sockets :-SS

@OZApps, it seems so.

MikeHart · February 2012

But for going the http route, I can only see it being usefull for a turn based game, or?

ar2rsawseen · February 2012

yep you're right. For now it'll be enough.
But have some future ideas, where probably sockets we'll be needed, so we'll see what atilim would have implemented then

MikeHart · February 2012

So you would store information of a turn inside a database then? And somehow, maybe because of a time stamp, the other players app knows now that it would be its turn?

ar2rsawseen · February 2012

Well, for now I don't see a better solution to poll server with specified interval. To not overheat the database, I usually write game states to file, so devices are polling static files, and when state changes, I update files on server side.
Each game server, which would usually be hosted on one of the devices, is a separate file.

atilim · February 2012

@ar2rsawseen maybe you can give a try to Luvit for server side: http://luvit.io/

I don't know much about server side programming but about these two options:
1. Poll the server in every 1-4 secs? with http request
2. Create a socket connection to the server and keep it alive
I don't know which one is better.

afaik, you cannot keep alive more than ~65000 sockets on the server side. Also, opening and closing sockets all the time can be as harsh as http requests. (so it seems it's a tough decision)

ar2rsawseen · February 2012

I'll give luvit a try, but if it's HTTP request, I can also use URLLoader, right?

My guess would be, that HTTP also has more overhead, meaning it consumes more bandwidth than Sockets, which can be quite an issue, when you are using it on mobile device and paying for sent/received data volume.

atilim · February 2012

I mean you can use Luvit on server side and URLLoader on gideros (client) side.

My guess would be, that HTTP also has more overhead, meaning it consumes more bandwidth than Sockets, which can be quite an issue, when you are using it on mobile device and paying for sent/received data volume.

I haven't thought about the bandwidth + cost, totally agree.

Mendes · April 2012

Hello everyone! Well I made a turn base game family of mancala:

Next step of my project is to have each player playing in their own devices. I'm trying Luvit on the server side and URLLoader on gideros client side. But I'm new to server side programming, any help with my http server will be appreciated.

Any suggestion will be great to!

Carlos

bowerandy · April 2012

Moai, has a server/communication system written in Lua. The SDK is open source so perhaps you could take a look at the way they do it. They make a charge for using their server hosting service(http://getmoai.com/pricing.html) so I don't know whether that pricing is just for hosting itself or whether the server code is hidden too.

I haven't used Moai (apart from a brief investigation) but one of the seemingly great things is that your server logic can be written with Lua. If we had a compatible system over here one could choose whether the host your own server or, for higher bandwidth apps, buy into the Moai hosting.

Best regards

@atilim, following the the Moai model might a good way forward for Gideros Mobile too?

katze · April 2012

Well if it would be possible to use gideros for the game and the let a gideros game comunicate via that moai stuff this would be a goot way to combine the niceness of gideros for the game stuff, and the niceness of the moaicloud for hosting game data.

i prevously wanted to use moai because of that cloud for (archievements, highscore list and such), but i dont like the moai api for the app itself, gideros is nicer and looks more completly and is well better documentated and more targeting the stuff that i need for making some gamies.
so it would really great if we could use gideros for the game , and the moaicloud stuff for the game data hosting stuff.
or maybe-baby there will be something similar for gideros later?

gorkem · April 2012

AFAIK, you can use Gideros Studio to develop your game, and subscribe to Moai cloud. If you want to keep your scores, leaderboards etc only, then Mogade can be a solution for you (http://mogade.com/). Their solution is both open source and hosted. Datakit (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3765365) is another open source option (like Parse.com or stackmob) that you can use in your application.

We are more focused on SDK and IDE at the moment and there are still things to be done there according to our roadmap. Building a backend to support gamers for download analytics, IAP stats, leaderboards, badges, crash analytics, log analytics, .. is very tempting, but resources are not enough to start with such a project, to be fair. It also deserves a thorough business model investigation to decide whether going that direction is feasible or not. @bowerandy @katze I think this answers your question(s).

avo · April 2012

Something that looks very interesting to me that have launched in the past week or so are: http://meteor.com/ and http://www.firebase.com/ which make building multiplayer web apps very easy, I believe all the data is passed back and forth through urls.

They use javascript but it seems like something like this would make turn based games very easy to implement multiplayer in.

Anyone see these new services and know more about it?

edit: I should mention check out the examples to see how cool these services are.

OZApps · April 2012

@Atilim and @Mendes, I wish I could Luvit, the issue is that it adds a new component to manage and administer which makes the process more fragile. OpenFeint and GameCenter are good options, Even if it is free and open source, more software to manage is more distraction from the task at hand of coding/creation. Just my 2 cents. I would love to have something that I do not have to rework on or create from scratch. Why re-invent the wheel, unless it is a 17" alloy rimmed cool wheels for your car

GameMinion · April 2012

Hi,

We have just launched a new service purely focused for games developers.
Our mission is handle the ugly server side stuff and let you focus on making great games.

Visit us http://gameminion.com and I invite you to register.

Would love to get feedback from the GiderOS community.

Regards,

-M

Garyk1968 · May 2012

@gameminion looks good but dont see any support for the gideros sdk, the others are well represented.

Garyk1968 · May 2012

o and no documentation?

soy_ismael · May 2012

Could you use http://www.andengine.org/forums/updates/multiplayerextension-autodiscovery-t3769.html ?

regards

atilim · May 2012

@soy_ismael Looks like a good extension. I've just looked at it briefly but with the addition of LuaSocket it will be possible to do similar things (broadcast over UDP to discover other clients automatically).

soy_ismael · May 2012

@atilim Great! when will we have?

atilim · May 2012

with the next version, in a couple of days.

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