It’s been more than a decade since I last wrote any C++ code, and I’m feeling nostalgic about it. I have also always wanted to build a game server, so today I made the daring decision to scratch both itches. I want the server to support all kinds of games: single player, two player, multiplayer,…
In the previous article of this series, I brainstormed about what my game server should look like. In this one, I will try to put all (or most) of that into code. The goal for this phase is to make a very basic version that: Warming up That said, let’s start with main(): Pretty straightforward:…
In the last article we made a very basic version of the server that accepts TCP connections and keeps track of its clients’ sessions. But what is a game server without games? In this article we will implement a simple, text-based Rock Paper Scissors game. Preparing the Server First of all, since we are about…
As promised in the previous article, we will define the application protocol (over TCP) that will be used to manage the user’s session. As I mentioned before, it should be text-based, and every line of text received will correspond to one prompt (or command). This functionality is already covered in sessionThread(), where prompts are assembled…
Our server has reached a point where users can authenticate, browse games and active game worlds, create new worlds and terminate them. In this article we will give them the ability to join games by adding a cmdJoin to our command arsenal. First things first, we have to add it to commandType and commandStrType: As…
In this article I will build a generic client for my server to make testing easier. However, my real objective is to come up with a Client class that will be used by any client application. It should be able to encapsulate all the nitty gritty for the communication, without making any assumptions about specific…
When I began to put my game server idea into code, the storage backend was way down the list of my priorities. Today I decided to take a deep breath and get it over with. In this article we will implement a database and refactor the Storage class to connect to it. Designing the Database…
I want to build a second little game of my server. In fact, I will build two versions of it (hence the plural): one against the machine (PvE) and another between two players (PvP). My motivation this time is to explore two aspects that games should have in a client/server setup, namely minimal network usage…
Now that my game server is at a decent level of development, and I have two fairly simple games to experiment with, I want to concentrate to the client side. Some time ago I came up with a Client class which facilitates the communication with the server. In this article, I want to define a…