Game engine design: Multiplayer and listen servers

Posted by jarx on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by jarx
Published on 2011-02-27T11:58:40Z Indexed on 2011/02/27 15:32 UTC
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engine

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multiplayer

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server

My game engine right now consists of a working singleplayer part. I'm now starting to think about how to do the multiplayer part.

I have found out that many games actually don't have a real singleplayer mode, but when playing alone you are actually hosting a local server as well, and almost everything runs as if you were in multiplayer (except that the data packets can be passed over an alternate route for better performance)

My engine would need major refactoring to adapt to this model. There would be three possible modes: Dedicated client, Dedicated server and Client-Server (listen mode)

* How often is the listen-server model used in the gaming industry?
* What are the (dis)advantages of it?
* What other options do I have?

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