Pandora Tincs - Multiplayer Shooter For Pandora (video)

[EpicLulz]

Member system!?!?!?

 

[Butterman]

Close. I decided from the very start that the master server running from here, is going to do much much more than just track servers. Before you play TINCS you're going to have to create an account. This is great for many reasons, firstly, if you're hacking or we want to ban you, usually we have no real power. Banning IPs is out of the question. Here, we can take away your stats and credability. It also means, you can track your global stats across all servers and possibly keep track of a ranking/unlocks. Kinda like BF2, you get 100 kills, or points or whatever, you get a new weapon. That's a maybe.

Right now, it's just keeping track of servers. I log in as test, and it gives me a list of active servers. Which would be empty, but I create a few fake entries into the list. But yea, it's going to be awesome.

 

[Phawx]

I don't know but Steam is opened. You are doing something with your NIC. Working on a PHP file. Have installed Firefox 3.1b with a chrome theme. Are downloading/uploading something with uTorrent. You need to update your Windows Box. You either have no anti-virus or you disabled UAC. I suspect your CPU is at 45 degrees C. That flower symbol looks familiar, is it "gotomeeting"? Why do you have your Audio control panel loaded?

 

[Butterman]

Flower symbol is riva tuner. You missed out the Razer icons.

 

[t3hmadhatt3r]

Close. I decided from the very start that the master server running from here, is going to do much much more than just track servers. Before you play TINCS you're going to have to create an account. This is great for many reasons, firstly, if you're hacking or we want to ban you, usually we have no real power. Banning IPs is out of the question. Here, we can take away your stats and credability. It also means, you can track your global stats across all servers and possibly keep track of a ranking/unlocks. Kinda like BF2, you get 100 kills, or points or whatever, you get a new weapon. That's a maybe.

Right now, it's just keeping track of servers. I log in as test, and it gives me a list of active servers. Which would be empty, but I create a few fake entries into the list. But yea, it's going to be awesome.

This sounds like a great idea!I have a psp and sony just sucks for doing nothing about the hackers online.I never ereally play my psp anyway.Lack of games and quality.Anyway, the stats idea is great and I also think it be great to have a store where you can buy new weapons (ingame points/stats only, no real money) once you level up etc.

 

[PSyMastR]

Butterman, if you need any help with a user interface and stuff also back-end stuff for the website, I live and breathe php/MySQL

 

[Butterman]

I very well may call on some help for it. I can accomplish it, but I don't have the time. I'm going to do a basic thing, just showing stats and online servers. Then recruit somebody to spice it all up a good bit.

 

[giovanni]

Hey Butter...
(when you'll have the time) can you make a simple video with the actual shader (with working specular maps)?

I suggest to add multiple lights that move around the objects...
...when you have the time...

Thank you

 

[Butterman]

Sure giovanni. It sounds like a good looking video. I've just integrated shaders into the client and started using my own modelview matrix. All I need now is to find a book that shows me how to derive 2d and 3d projection matrices and i'm sorted for Pandora compatibility. I should be able to use identical (apart from my window class) code across Windows, Linux, Mac and Pandora when I've got that last matrix sorted yay!

Everything is really going well. It's looking good.

 

[EpicLulz]

I think it would be awesome to have a user system that could be implemented into all games for the Pandora that needed it. It could keep track of stats and achievements. I'm just dreaming right now but it would be pretty sweet to do. I know a good amount of PHP/MYSQL/HTML/CSS, so maybe it could be one group effort? All of the data transfer could be done with HTTP and GET requests, so it could be even implemented into other things besides games. I dunno. It would be sweet though.

 

[lulzfish]

I think it would be awesome to have a user system that could be implemented into all games for the Pandora that needed it. It could keep track of stats and achievements. I'm just dreaming right now but it would be pretty sweet to do. I know a good amount of PHP/MYSQL/HTML/CSS, so maybe it could be one group effort? All of the data transfer could be done with HTTP and GET requests, so it could be even implemented into other things besides games. I dunno. It would be sweet though.

Definitely. The trick is getting it set up early and making it easy for small developers to work with.
For instance, I have absolutely no idea how I'd work with HTTP requests from within a program. Or at all, really.

 

[Butterman]

Using HTTP requests is horrible. What's wrong with any of the millions of C MySQL libraries?

I'd think twice before using it for TINCS, because TINCS is multiplatform.

 

[giovanni]

I don't know very much about programming... but I want to suggest Tokamak (open source) as a pysic engine for this game...

Is that possible?

I mean, maybe it needs a port but it's always better than recode a physic engine from zero...

 

[EpicLulz]

Ok, I don't really know much C++, or any programming for that matter, but I can work on the web interfaces, PHP, and MYSQL stuff. What would you look for in the system to use in your game?

 

[Butterman]

I don't know very much about programming... but I want to suggest Tokamak (open source) as a pysic engine for this game...

Is that possible?

I mean, maybe it needs a port but it's always better than recode a physic engine from zero...

I'm not thinking about Physics yet. It would be really cool to integrate a hawt Physics library, but I'm already overloaded with TINCS stuff along side my life it's quite hard to promise new features. I'll look into it.

Ok, I don't really know much C++, or any programming for that matter, but I can work on the web interfaces, PHP, and MYSQL stuff. What would you look for in the system to use in your game?

Right now, game servers connec to the master server. Which is a Linux box running APACHE, PHP and MySQL. The master server logs that server into the database or updates its information if it already exists in there. This is stuff like "Number of Players", "Map", etc. It also caches some of that information in the RAM. This is for easy access when players contact the master server for a list of running servers. If we had to read the HDD each time, it would get quite slow. All of this interaction is done with MySQL libraries. You can then access this information from the web. So this system has two uses, an easy way for the client to find servers. As well as a way for players to check on servers from outside the client.

What I also want to do, is have new players sign up to our site. Then they download the client from there, use the log in details to start TINCS. When they join a server, they pass their unique id, the server uses this when it updates with the master server. If the player has been playing for longer than 5 minutes, their stats get sent to the master server, which updates their kills/deaths and the ratios and stuff like that.

I'm going to need to recruit a few good web guys to set up proper databases and write the PHP component when the time comes. If somebody wants to map out MySQL tables and what they should contain on the Jottit that would be helpful, we can start organising what data we want to store and how.

 

[Mithrildor]

So in quick:

-game makes a .txt about recent stats and updates this every ?? seconds
-after 300 seconds the game uploads the .txt to the server
-the game deletes the .txt
-the server stores those. txt files into a larger .txt with everything right
-on the internet browser at the tincs website the larger .txt is showed.
-repeat from 1.

Am I right with this loop? Sounds really nice.

 

[Butterman]

There is no .txt file. It's all streamed via TCP. Also, the game isn't part of it. There is only the game server (the server running the map that you connect to to play) and the master server (the server that all of the servers connect to).

In quick:

- Every 5 minutes the game server will send information about recent stats, but only for players who have been on for longer than 5 minutes.
- The master server sorts this information and stores it in a MySQL database.
- The PHP component of the TINCS website sorts this information and shows it in all pretty ways. With searching for players, highest kills, highest deaths, highest KD ratio. Kinda like the Halo 3 site

CODE

http://www.bungie.net/stats/Halo3/default.aspx?player=SRGNT%20Skittles



I'm also thinking about ranking up and unlockables.

 

[EpicLulz]

I've done stuff like this in the past, but instead of C++ I used Game Maker because I actually know how to code in that.

The only problem I came up with is if this game is going to be open source, people could easily cheat by looking at the send info functions in the game. Are you using anything to help prevent cheating? I already discussed this in another topic and I'm kind of drawing a blank.

 

[Mithrildor]

I think butterman said that already before: The client just sends to the server which button the player uses and the server processes this and then sends the client back that the character can move one step. You will only lose because of cheating.

 

[Butterman]

Cheating will be pretty damn hard. Everything is checksummed, and compared against the servers files to make sure it's all cosher. It's not open-source either .