Jul 5, 2015

Progress Update July 2015

In the last couple of months I've continued integrating the fruits of my new terrain generator side-project into the main project. Progress has been good, and I should be up and running with the new terrain any day now.

I took a brief detour to explore network connectivity as I've always imagined that Bulldog would eventually support multiplayer functionality. Since I started the project with singleplayer in mind, there's a great deal of work to do to make the game client/server capable. I decided to kick things off by getting the new terrain generator to run on the server thread, and have the client request it via a network call, as it will eventually function that way for multiplayer.

Before I could get going on that I needed to decide on a network stack. I started rolling my own and got a little ways into it with a brief proof of concept that achieved listening and connecting before I decided to look around for pre-built network solutions for .net.  The first one I came across was RakNet, it's been around for quite some time, is used by a lot of people and supports C#.

I grabbed the source and I've spent 4 hours trying to get the examples compiling. I followed the c# tutorial and ran into issues, such as the build failing due to missing folders. So I fixed that by creating the folders. Then there were files missing from the project. I found them and added them to the project. None of the generated files have any standard "using" clauses, so I add the required "using" clauses to the generated code. Now I'm stuck with build errors such as "Cannot implicitly convert type 'RakNet.Row' to 'RakNet.TableRow'" or "Cannot apply indexing with [] to an expression of type 'RakNet.SWIGTYPE_p_DataStructures__ListT_DataStructures__Table__Cell_p_t'"... the list goes on...

The above paragraph is actually from a gamedev.net post I wrote in desperation after having no success with RakNet. Luckily, my friend, axefrog, saw my post and put me onto lidgren, which I'd also seen during my searches before I settled on RakNet.

I took his advice and checked it out and the difference was like night and day. It required one tiny tweak to get it working (Bulldog is built on .net 4 and the latest lidgren assumes .net 4.5 or higher). I hit the internet for tutorials to write some test code. Unfortunately most lidgren tutorials are slightly out of date, leading to a weird corruption issue with status messages, but I sorted that out quickly. In an hour or so I was up and running with a decent message-based network system.

This represents a big change. It's very unlike me to rely on 3rd party components. I much prefer to write everything myself as I can fix bugs in my own code or add functionality I need. I felt vindicated by the difficulties I experienced with RakNet and was itching to go back to the roll your own method. The subtext of my gamedev.net post was that if I didn't get some decent suggestions I was going back to my own implementation.

In the end I'm glad I didn't, and I'm indebted to axefrog for putting me on the right path.  Cheers, mate!

2 comments:

  1. Nice work, looking forward to some new screenshots! :D

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  2. Writing test codes and making sure servers are up and running are all components for being one step closer to getting an online site up and running. If the codes don't pan out, then it can take time to figure out exactly where something needs to be changed but it can happen and make the site better than before.

    Arthur Jones @ MultiChill Technologies Inc.

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