2 questions

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

Hi, I’m new to game design in general. Anyway, I’m designing an online RPG and have a couple of questions…

  1. Should I let the user input events update the game state directly, OR, store the inputs somewhere and have the game loop update the game state from the stored inputs.

  2. How should I store the persisent online RPG data? I was thinking of just creating my own data structure and serializing it at regular intervals, don’t know how slow this will be. Should I use a database?

Thanks,

Phi

#2

IMHO:

  1. Store inputs & process them in main game loop. You also need to consider what inputs may effect the game state directly, and which indirectly via the server.

  2. The game state needs to be stored on the server. Access to game state needs to be fast, so I would expect it to be held in program and a snapshots taken from time to time for backup purposes. (Well that’s what I’d do)

(I assume you have some idea of the amount of work that goes into an online RPG)

Alan

#3

Thanks.

Of course, it all depends on how complicated I want to make it. I’m making it 2D topdown, without animation to start with, and as for the “RPG” well at the moment my goal is just to make a kind of visual chat room without all the other bells and whistles.