How to write a network game?

Posted by TomWij on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by TomWij
Published on 2010-07-14T21:23:24Z Indexed on 2011/03/16 16:19 UTC
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Based on Why is so hard to develop a MMO?:

Networked game development is not trivial; there are large obstacles to overcome in not only latency, but cheat prevention, state management and load balancing. If you're not experienced with writing a networked game, this is going to be a difficult learning exercise.

I know the theory about sockets, servers, clients, protocols, connections and such things.

Now I wonder how one can learn to write a network game:

  • How to balance load problems?
  • How to manage the game state?
  • How to keep things synchronized?
  • How to protect the communication and client from reverse engineering?
  • How to work around latency problems?
  • Which things should be computed local and which things on the server?
  • ...

Are there any good books, tutorials, sites, interesting articles or other questions regarding this?

I'm looking for broad answers, but specific ones are fine too to learn the difference.

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