How to handle multiple room instances

alex_h · Post by **alex_h** » 17 Nov 2011, 13:02

Say I have a game 'Game A' that allows only 2 players. So player 1 arrives in the lobby, and decides to start a game by pressing a button.
This triggers a room to be created, called 'game_a' and player 1 joins that room.
Now player 2 arrives in the lobby, decides he also wants to play Game A and presses the button to do so. Great, he joins player 1 in the existing game room, I detect that there are now 2 players and so I start the game.
Now player 3 comes along into the lobby. He also wants to play Game A so he presses the button. I detect that all existing Game A rooms are full, which means I need to create a new one.

BUT - the name 'game_a' is already taken.

I could work around this by appending in integer to the room name, but I'd need a technique to ensure that the integer is unique - I'm not sure what would be the best way to do this? Appending to the room name would also make it problematic to try to retrieve rooms by name. I was intending to have all my 'Game A' rooms kept in a 'Game A Group' so that I can retrieve them all in one array - does that sound like a sensible approach? There must obviously be a standard way to deal with this problem - could anyone let me know what it is?

thanks a lot,

Alex

alex_h · Post by **alex_h** » 17 Nov 2011, 14:31

To answer my own question - I suppose that if I handle the game room creation via a Zone level extensions (as per the answer to my previous post) then I can just have an integer within my Zone extension class that is incremented each time a game room is created, and append this to the name. I guess this just means that I then avoid getting rooms by name from within my client side AS3 code, since I won't know what a room instance's name is unless I already have a reference to it.

Or am I getting this all horribly wrong...?

rjgtav · Post by **rjgtav** » 17 Nov 2011, 19:16

Yes you are correct

. Just remember than the int datatype, like all the other ones, has a limit, so when you reach that limit, you can simply start again from 0

alex_h · Post by **alex_h** » 18 Nov 2011, 10:24

thanks rjgtav! Yes, funnily enough I was just considering the int - max value issue. Thinking about it, as long as I make the looping occur at a sufficiently high number (more than the number of rooms likely to be open at once) then it is going to avoid any problems, it doesn't have to check for 2,147,483,647!