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• Implementing a multilanguage AI contest platform

  - by Alejandro Piad

  This is a followup to this question. To sum: I'm implementing an AI contest site, where each user may submit several AI implementations for different games. Think about Google AI Challenge but instead of just having a big event once a year, I would like it more on a league fashion, with all virtual players playing with each other every some close period of time. I want to support as many programming languages as possible. I've seen that contest sites (like codeforces) ask you to submit a source code and interact through stdin and stdout. The first question is: what is the best way of supporting multiple languages? As I see it, I can either ask people to upload some binary/script, and interact either through stdin/*stdout*, or sockets, or the file system; or ask people to submit source code, and wrap it with whatever is necessary for the interaction. I would like to skip the need to compile the code by myself (in the server, I mean), but I am willing to do it if its the "best" choice. I need to comunicate virtual players with each other, or even better, with some intermediary arbiter. The second question is regarding security. If I'm going to be running user code in my server, I want to ensure strict security conditions, like no file system access, no networking, etc. Otherwise it would be a safe heaven for hackers. I will be implementing the engine/arbiter in .NET. I would like to support at least C#, C++, Java and Python for the user's implementations. I'm willing to write interfaces for each of these languages to simplify the user interaction with the system. Thanks in advance.

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• Handling packet impersonating in client-server model online game

  - by TheDespite

  I am designing a server-client model game library/engine. How do I, and should I even bother to handle frequent update packet possible impersonating? In my current design anyone could copy a packet from someone else and modify it to execute any non-critical action for another client. I am currently compressing all datagrams so that adds just a tad of security. Edit: One way I thought about was to send a unique "key" to the verified client every x_time and then the client has to add that to all of it's update packets until a new key is sent. Edit2: I should have mentioned that I am not concerned about whether the actions described in the packet are available to the client at the time, this is all checked by the server which I thought was obvious. I am only concerned about someone sending packets for another client.

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• How to manage own bots at the server?

  - by Nikolay Kuznetsov

  There is a game server and people can play in game rooms of 2, 3 or 4. When a client connects to server he can send a request specifying a number of people or range he wants to play with. One of this value is valid: {2-4, 2-3, 3-4, 2, 3, 4} So the server maintains 3 separate queues for game room with 2, 3 and 4 people. So we can denote queues as #2, #3 and #4. It work the following way. If a client sends request, 3-4, then two separate request are added to queues #3 and #4. If queue #3 now have 3 requests from different people then game room with 3 players is created, and all other requests from those players are removed from all queues. Right now not many people are online simultaneously, so they apply for a game wait for some time and quit because game does not start in a reasonable time. That's a simple bot for beginning has been developed. So there is a need to patch server code to run a bot, if some one requests a game, but humans are not online. Input: request from human {2-4, 2-3, 3-4, 2, 3, 4} Output: number of bots to run and time to wait for each before connecting, depending on queues state. The problem is that I don't know how to manage bots properly at the server? Example: #3 has 1 request and #4 has 1 request Request from user is {3,4} then server can add one bot to play game with 3 people or two bots to play game of 4. Example: #3 has 1 request and #4 has 2 requests Request from user is {3,4} then in each case just one bot is needed so game with 4 players is more preferrable.

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• Permanent death in a MUD (think command line MMORPG)

  - by Luke Laupheimer

  I have considered writing a MUD for years, and I have a lot of ideas my friends think are really cool (and that's how I'd hope to get anywhere -- word of mouth). Thing is, there's one thing I have always wanted, that my friends and strangers hated: permanent death. Now, the emotional response I get to this is visceral revulsion, every time. I'm pretty sure I am the only person that wants this, or if I'm not, I'm a tiny minority. Now, the reason I want it is because I want the actions of the players to matter. Unlike a lot of other MUDs, which have a set of static city-states and social institutions etc, I want the things my players do, should I get any, to actually change the situation. And that includes killing people. If you kill someone, you didn't send them to time out, you killed them. What happens when you kill people? They go away. They don't come back in half an hour to smack talk you some more. They're gone. Forever. By making death non-permanent, you make death not matter. It would be similar if a climax to a character's arc is getting a speeding ticket. It cheapens it. Non-permanent death cheapens death. How can I: 1) Convince my players (and random people!) that this is actually a good idea?, or 2) Find some other way to make death and violence matter as much as it does in real life (except within the game, of course) sans character deletion? What alternatives are there out there?

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• How to write a network game? [closed]

  - by Tom Wijsman

  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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• Group Matchmaking

  - by Simon Kérouack

  Consider different groups(1 or more players) queuing together, we want to make 2 opposing teams containing each the same amount of players while keeping the groups together. At the same time we want to make both teams' average ranking as close as possible. Now also consider we have as a working set the subset of groups currently queuing within a given ranking range. For an example, let's say we have the following groups, ordered by queuing time: Id, playerCount, totalRank, avgRank 0, 3, 126, 42 1, 2, 60, 30 2, 1, 25, 25 3, 2, 80, 40 4, 1, 40, 40 5, 1, 20, 20 6, 3, 150, 50 for this specific subset, the expected output should ideally be: team1: 0, 1 (total: 186) team2: 2, 5, 6 (total: 195) up to now the solution I have been using is to balance out each team by making each team pick the group with highest ranking within the subset turn by turn. The team who picks is the one with the currently lowest average rank unless one is already full. If one team is already full the other team tries to complete itself with groups that would make the rank gap as small as possible. This solution turns out to have issues with frequent edge cases and I'm looking for a better solution, or some fine-tuning that could be made. In most cases, players seems to want teams of 5 people and queue in group of 2. Our average subset when 2 teams of 5 are chosen is made of about 14 players if that may be of any help.

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• Has a multi player graphic adventure* ever been made?

  - by Petruza

  By graphic adventure, I mean point & click LucasArts-type games. Those games have a mostly linear structure in nature, and usually don't offer as many variants as other games types like action, rpg, strategy, which makes this genre difficult to implement a multi-player feature. I'd like to know if there has been any attempts on doing such a thing, and if it would be viable, as players going offline or leaving a game in the middle would affect significantly the other players' game.

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• How important is a single-player mode in a 2-player game?

  - by Davy8

  So say you have a 2 player game, taking Chess as an example (except it's an original game with no ready-to-go AI available). Let's say there's also a social-aspect to the meta-game, so let's say it's a Chess game on Facebook where you can challenge your friends. How important is it to have a single-player mode, knowing that an AI will need to be created (I've done minimax AI for tic tac toe, but nothing too sophisticated)? Is it important enough that it should be in the initial launch of the game? Can it wait for a future iteration (knowing that being hosted on the web means the game can be updated at any time)?

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• How are trajectories calculated and transmitted to other players in Multi-Player ?

  - by giulio

  I play alot of COD4. And can see tracers for gunfire, missles, care packages fall from helicopters etc. There is alot of activity. I am curious to know the algorithm (at a high level) that manages all this action when you have 20 people on a map shooting each other to death ? This question touches on the subject but doesn't ask for a more in-depth answer as to how you the developers go about calculating and transmitting movement and collision detection for projectiles, be it missles/bullets or any other object that is flying through the air in real-time.

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• How many players can UDK support without Networking

  - by N0xus

  I've been looking for the answer to this for some time now, but cannot find anything online that is helpful. What I want to know is the amount of players that the UDK can support on one single machine. An example of this would be golden eye on the N64. On that, you could get 4 players all playing the same game at the same time using split screen. Like in this image: Does anyone know is the UDK is capable of doing similar?

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• How to properly do weapon cool-down reload timer in multi-player laggy environment?

  - by John Murdoch

  I want to handle weapon cool-down timers in a fair and predictable way on both client on server. Situation: Multiple clients connected to server, which is doing hit detection / physics Clients have different latency for their connections to server ranging from 50ms to 500ms. They want to shoot weapons with fairly long reload/cool-down times (assume exactly 10 seconds) It is important that they get to shoot these weapons close to the cool-down time, as if some clients manage to shoot sooner than others (either because they are "early" or the others are "late") they gain a significant advantage. I need to show time remaining for reload on player's screen Clients can have clocks which are flat-out wrong (bad timezones, etc.) What I'm currently doing to deal with latency: Client collects server side state in a history, tagged with server timestamps Client assesses his time difference with server time: behindServerTimeNs = (behindServerTimeNs + (System.nanoTime() - receivedState.getServerTimeNs())) / 2 Client renders all state received from server 200 ms behind from his current time, adjusted by what he believes his time difference with server time is (whether due to wrong clocks, or lag). If he has server states on both sides of that calculated time, he (mostly LERP) interpolates between them, if not then he (LERP) extrapolates. No other client-side prediction of movement, e.g., to make his vehicle seem more responsive is done so far, but maybe will be added later So how do I properly add weapon reload timers? My first idea would be for the server to send each player the time when his reload will be done with each world state update, the client then adjusts it for the clock difference and thus can estimate when the reload will be finished in client-time (perhaps considering also for latency that the shoot message from client to server will take as well?), and if the user mashes the "shoot" button after (or perhaps even slightly before?) that time, send the shoot event. The server would get the shoot event and consider the time shot was made as the server time when it was received. It would then discard it if it is nowhere near reload time, execute it immediately if it is past reload time, and hold it for a few physics cycles until reload is done in case if it was received a bit early. It does all seem a bit convoluted, and I'm wondering whether it will work (e.g., whether it won't be the case that players with lower ping get better reload rates), and whether there are more elegant solutions to this problem.

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• Simple 2 player server

  - by Sourabh Lal

  I have recently started learning javascript and html and have developed simple 2 player games such as tick-tack-toe, battleship, and dots&boxes. However these 2 player games can only be played on one computer (i.e. the 2 players must sit together) However, I want to modify this so that one can play with a friend on a different computer. Any suggestions on how this is possible? Also since I am a beginner please do not assume that I know all the jargon.

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• Client side prediction/simulation Question

  - by Legendre

  I found a related question but it doesn't have what I needed. Client A sends input to move at T0. Server receives input at T1. All clients receive the change at T2. Question: With client-side prediction, client A would start moving at T0, client-side. All other clients receive the change at T2, so to them, client A only started moving at T2. If I understand correctly, client B will always see client A's past position and not his current position? How do I sync both client B and client A?

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• How can I make permanent death in a MUD seem acceptable and fair to players?

  - by Luke Laupheimer

  I have considered writing a MUD for years, and I have a lot of ideas my friends think are really cool (and that's how I'd hope to get anywhere -- word of mouth). Thing is, there's one thing I have always wanted, that my friends and strangers hated: permanent death. Now, the emotional response I get to this is visceral revulsion, every time. I'm pretty sure I am the only person that wants this, or if I'm not, I'm a tiny minority. Now, the reason I want it is because I want the actions of the players to matter. Unlike a lot of other MUDs, which have a set of static city-states and social institutions etc, I want the things my players do, should I get any, to actually change the situation. And that includes killing people. If you kill someone, you didn't send them to time out, you killed them. What happens when you kill people? They go away. They don't come back in half an hour to smack talk you some more. They're gone. Forever. By making death non-permanent, you make death not matter. It would be similar if a climax to a character's arc is getting a speeding ticket. It cheapens it. Non-permanent death cheapens death. How can I: 1) Convince my players (and random people!) that this is actually a good idea?, or 2) Find some other way to make death and violence matter as much as it does in real life (except within the game, of course) sans character deletion? What alternatives are there out there?

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• Passing data between engine layers

  - by spaceOwl

  I am building a software system (game engine with networking support ) that is made up of (roughly) these layers: Game Layer Messaging Layer Networking Layer Game related data is passed to the messaging layer (this could be anything that is game specific), where they are to be converted to network specific messages (which are then serialized to byte arrays). I'm looking for a way to be able to convert "game" data into "network" data, such that no strong coupling between these layers will exist. As it looks now, the Messaging layer sits between both layers (game and network) and "knows" both of them (it contains Converter objects that know how to translate between data objects of both layers back and forth). I am not sure this is the best solution. Is there a good design for passing objects between layers? I'd like to learn more about the different options.

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• How to display image in second layer in Cocos2d

  - by PeterK

  I am very new at Cocos2d and is testing to displaying an image over the "Hello World" text on a second layer and need help to get it work. I guess it is some basic stuff here and appreciate any tips etc. with this. I know that if i put the display-code (myLayer1) in the "init" it work or do the call [self goHere] from the "init" in myLayer1 it works but i want to call the "goHere" directly. I have the following code: HelloWorld.m: #import "HelloWorldLayer.h" #import "myLayer1.h" // HelloWorldLayer implementation @implementation HelloWorldLayer +(CCScene *) scene { // 'scene' is an autorelease object. CCScene *scene = [CCScene node]; // 'layer' is an autorelease object. HelloWorldLayer *layer = [HelloWorldLayer node]; myLayer1 *layer1 = [myLayer1 node]; // add layer as a child to scene [scene addChild: layer]; [scene addChild: layer1]; // return the scene return scene; } // on "init" you need to initialize your instance -(id) init { // always call "super" init // Apple recommends to re-assign "self" with the "super" return value if( (self=[super init])) { // create and initialize a Label CCLabelTTF *label = [CCLabelTTF labelWithString:@"Hello World" fontName:@"Marker Felt" fontSize:64]; // ask director the the window size CGSize size = [[CCDirector sharedDirector] winSize]; // position the label on the center of the screen label.position = ccp( size.width /2 , size.height/2 ); // add the label as a child to this Layer [self addChild: label]; myLayer1 *a1 = [myLayer1 new]; [a1 goHere]; [myLayer1 release]; } return self; } myLayer1.m: #import "myLayer1.h" @implementation myLayer1 -(void)goHere { NSLog(@">>>>goHere<<<<"); CGSize size = [[CCDirector sharedDirector] winSize]; CCSprite *vv = [CCSprite spriteWithFile:@"hand.png"]; vv.position = ccp( size.width /2 , size.height/2 ); [self addChild:vv z:3]; } -(id) init { // always call "super" init // Apple recommends to re-assign "self" with the "super" return value if( (self=[super init])) { } return self; } @end

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• Has a multi player graphic adventure* ever been made?

  - by Petruza

  By graphic adventure, I mean point & click LucasArts-type games. Those games have a mostly linear structure in nature, and usually don't offer as many variants as other games types like action, rpg, strategy, which makes this genre difficult to implement a multi-player feature. I'd like to know if there has been any attempts on doing such a thing, and if it would be viable, as players going offline or leaving a game in the middle would affect significantly the other players' game.

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• What are the pros and cons of non-unique display names?

  - by Davy8

  I know of at least big title game (Starcraft II) that doesn't require unique display names, so it would seem like it can work in at least some circumstance. Under what situations does allowing non-unique display names work well? When does it not work well? Does it come down to whether or not impersonation of someone else is a problem? The reasons I believe it works for Starcraft II is that there isn't any kind of in-game trading of virtual goods and other than "for kicks" there isn't much incentive to impersonate someone else in the game. There's also ladder rankings so even trying to impersonate a pro is easily detectable unless you're on a similar skill level. What are some other cases where it makes sense to specifically allow or disallow duplicate display names?

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• A simple example of movement prediction

  - by Daniel

  I've seen lots of examples of theory about the reason for client-side prediction, but I'm having a hard time converting it into code. I was wondering if someone knows of some specific examples that share some of the code, or can share their knowledge to shed some light into my situation. I'm trying to run some tests to get a the movement going (smoothly) between multiple clients. I'm using mouse input to initiate movement. I'm using AS3 and C# on a local Player.IO server. Right now I'm trying to get the Client side working, as I'm only forwarding position info with the client. I have 2 timers, one is an onEnterFrame and the other is a 100ms Timer, and one on mouseClick listener. When I click anywhere with a mouse, I update my player class to give it a destination point On every enterFrame Event for the player, it moves towards the destination point At every 100ms it sends a message to the server with the position of where it should be in a 100ms. The distance traveled is calculated by taking the distance (in Pixels) that the player can travel in one second, and dividing it by the framerate for the onEnterFrame handler, and by the update frequency (1/0.100s) for the server update. For the other Players, the location is interpolated and animated on every frame based on the new location. Is this the right way of doing it?

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• Prediction happening on (sending) client side

  - by Daniel

  This seems like a simple enough concept, but I haven't seen this implemented anywhere yet. Assuming that the server just forwards and verifies data... I'm using mouse-based movement, so it's not too difficult to predict the location of the player 150ms from when the event is sent. I'm thinking it is more accurate than using old data and older data on the receiving clients' side. The question I have, is why can I not find any examples of this? Is there something fundamentally wrong with this that I cannot find anyone implementing or talking about implementing this.

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• What data-structure/algorithm will allow me to send a list of key/value dictionaries using the least amount of bits?

  - by user12365

  I have server objects that have corresponding client objects. The data to be kept in sync is inside the server object's key/value dictionary. To keep the client objects in sync with the sever objects, I want the server to send the key/value dictionary every frame for each object. What data-structure/algorithm will allow me to send a list of key/value dictionaries using the least amount of bits? Bonus constraint 1: For each type of object, the values of some keys change more often than others. Bonus constraint 2: Memory usage on the server side is relatively expensive.

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• Why are prefab customizations being applied to only a single character? [on hold]

  - by m0rgul

  I've built my (networked) game to the point where I have a room, some characters and a character customization screen. In the character customization screen I get to chose gender, chose from three different wardrobe options and assign custom colors to these wardrobe items. Then I use a custom object to store these options, serialize them and store them in PlayerPrefs, then load the next scene and apply them to my chosen character in this scene. Then I go and spawn some more characters, customize them, etc. The problem is that my character is always customized, but all other characters in the scene are default copies of the prefab. The prefabs themselves are a generic male and a generic female, both with three different wardrobes to chose from (they are included in the prefab). When I spawn my character, I go to the saved options in PlayerPrefs, destroy the two discarded wardrobes, apply color to my chosen wardrobe and then spawn the character. How would it be possible to make the other characters also show up in their customized form rather than just the generic prefab (which shows all three wardrobes at the same time)?

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• Simple (and fast) dices physics

  - by Markus von Broady

  I'm programming a throw of 5 dices in Actionscript 3 + AwayPhysics (BulletPhysics port). I had a lot of fun tweaking frictions, masses etc. and in the end I found best results with more physics ticks per frame. Currently I use 10 ticks per frame (1/60 s) and it's OK, though I see a difference in plus for 20 ticks. Even though it's only 5 cubes (dices) in a box (or a floor with 3 walls really) I can't simulate 20 ticks in a frame and keep FPS at 60 on a medium-aged PC. That's why I decided to precompute frames for animation, finishing it in around 1700 ticks in 2 seconds. The flash player is freezed for these 2 seconds, and I'm afraid that this result will be more of a 5 seconds or even more, if I'll simulate multi-threading and compute frames in background of some other heavy processes and CPU drawing (dices is only a part of this game). Because I want both players to see dices roll in same way, I can't compute physics when having free resources, and build a buffer for at least one throw of each type (where type is number of dices thrown). I'm afraid players will see a "preparing dices........." message too often and for too long. I think the only solution to this problem is replacing PhysicsEngine with something simpler, or creating own physicsEngine. Do You have any formulas for cube-cube and cube-wall collision detection, and for calculating how their angular and linear velocities should change after a collision occurs?

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• processing gamestate with a window of commands across time?

  - by rook2pawn

  I have clients sending client updates at a 100ms intervals. i pool the command inputs and create a client command frame. the commands come into the server in these windows and i tag them across time as they come in. when i do a server tick i intend to process this list of commands i.e. [ {command:'duck',timestamp:350,player:'a'}, {command:'shoot',timestamp:395,player:'b'}, {command:'move', timestamp:410,player:'c'} {command:'cover',timestamp:420,player:'a'} ] how would i efficiently update the gamestate based on this list? the two solutions i see are 1) simulate time via direct equation to figure out how far everyone would move or change as if the real gameupdate was ticking on the worldtick..but then unforseen events that would normally trigger during real update would not get triggered such as powerups or collissions 2) prepare to run the worldupdate multiple times and figure out which commands get sent to which worldupdate. this seems better but a little more costly is there a canonical way to do this?

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• Techniques to prevent non-official clients in network gaming?

  - by UpTheCreek

  In multi-player network games, what techniques exist to try to ensure that users are connecting with the official client application, and not some hacked client app? I realise there is probably no sure-fire way to do this, but rather I'm interested in techniques that can be employed to mitigate the problem. I'm especially interested in any techniques that can be used for web based games, but I imagine most can be applied generally. Thank you!

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