I have been thinking lately about which shortcuts one could take when it comes to multiplayer games.
I have seen several homemades serveres and they are ussualy lots of trouble making, this is ofcourse including homemade protocols.
Isent there a market full of Java servers usuable for gojo(good old java objects ) programming. What about tomcat, Suns J2ee server, what about darkstar?
What kind of shortcuts could be made in terms of a non-buggy reliable server framework?
Tomcat and the other parts of J2EE are designed for business apps, not games.
They generally give you the wrong kinds of knobs and the wrong performance characteristics.
A notable exception is using web technologies for downloading static data. This they are pretty good at.
Darkstar was designed specificly to address the issues that the Web technologies do not address well and is designed for game coding. As its chief architect I’d suggest you look at it for interactive game server functionality and,a s mentioned, something like Aapche for the download of large blocks of static data.
Simply: no. But expect to see them in the near future. The places where java is a good fit for general online apps and more specifically for MP games dev are increasing, and that’s causing a lot more people to look seriously at providing such products. I would not expect it to be long before you have a decent choice of such products.
Or … you don’t have to use java on the server. I think you should, if you can, but … there’s some great stuff out there if you don’t. And you’re still getting the benefits of java on the client, so it’s still better than doing everything in C.
There’s a couple of POJO database servers you might want to look at, that let you do persistence simply and effectively - much easier than EJB and JDO, both of which failed to go in the right directions for general application development (even EJB 3.0’s JPA 1.0 isn’t quite right, just a bit too much unnecessary hassle) - although performance is a question mark you’ll have to assess for yourself.
Just google for them. Can’t remember the names of the free / low cost ones off the top of my head.
Oh, and … you could do a lot worse than to pick up the Charles River Media books (MMO Programming Gems 1, 2, etc; Game Programming Gems 1-6) - there’s some great “best practice” chapters in them about particular parts of MP game dev that tell you just how to do stuff. But check before you buy - it can be hit and miss with individual books what you’re actually getting.
Thankyou 