VB LAN programming

[illya]

I am currently a computer games development student, as part of this uni year I need to create a game and although it does not have to have network capabilities I feel that it would greatly improve the game. I’m assuming it won’t be simple code so obviously you can’t simply give me the code (not to mention plagiarism reasons) but I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction so I could investigate and try to figure out how to code it.

[powdarrmonkey]

Do you have any network programming experience or are you starting from scratch?

[illya]

No unfortunatly i have never done any LAN programming. I've done collision ditection, timers ect so I know I can create the game no problem, that's why I wanted to go into the more complex coding

[powdarrmonkey]

If this is a dissertation, now is a good time to change it

 

It's a big area, and there are many ways to implement it, but in VB the easiest is using sockets (specifically the System.Net.Sockets namespace).

[illya]

Thanks for pointing me in the right dirrection.

I'll keep it in mind although the documentation that's needed is more towards what we did then what we could have done and I've always been a bit stuborn when it comes to a challange hehe

[powdarrmonkey]

I've always been a bit stuborn when it comes to a challange hehe

 

you and me both!

[srochford]

Depending on how fast you need responses, you could do something reasonably easily by having a web server running on one machine and other machines making requests from that/passing responses back to it. Downside is that http is relatively slow (there's a lot of overhead just to request the status of an object, pass back co-ordinates etc)

 

A quick google finds this example - it's to do with secure message passing and it's the sort of thing which I think you need to do. Obviously, you have to work out what's going to be passed and you don't need the GUI setup but it might get you started.

[dhicks]

as part of this uni year I need to create a game and although it does not have to have network capabilities I feel that it would greatly improve the game.

 

Figure out what, exactly, you want to add to your game. "Networking" is a little vague. How do you want the players to be able to interact over the network - just by talking together, or do you want to have actual real-time positions of each gamer reported? What is the game play of your game? Is this an arcade style game? You can design the gameplay to not need so much network traffic. Also, remember deterministic physics are your friend. There's no point generating a random number on one machine and (for instance) sending constant X,Y position updates of players and/or non-player characters to the other machine(s) - instead, just send the keypresses your one user makes and let the game engine on the remote computer figure the rest out. Remember "random" numbers aren't random, they are generated by a determanistic formula from a seed value - set the same seed value on all machines and you get the same "random" numbers on all of them, which saves you having to transmit them.

 

Make sure you know your basic network theory - how the network is organised into a "stack" of layers and which layer you are sending data on. I'm guessing that with VB you can use lower-level stuff than TCP / HTTP - UDP might be more appropriate in your case.

 

If you can explain the gameplay of your game in a little more detail, maybe we can think up a few more suggestions.

 

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David Hicks