Online flash games

[alcho]

I have been seeing more and more multiplayer online flash games. Are they all using servers like SmartFox? Can you connect directly in flash, like peer2peer?

Really what i am asking is, what different methods are being used to create these multiplayer games? What options does one have if they want to create such a game?

Thanks,

Alcho

[Bax]

I have been seeing more and more multiplayer online flash games. Are they all using servers like SmartFox? Can you connect directly in flash, like peer2peer?

Yes, SmartFoxServer is the serverside technology to build multiplayer games in Flash. But SmartFoxServer is a standard client-server application, not relying on a p2p network.

Really what i am asking is, what different methods are being used to create these multiplayer games? What options does one have if they want to create such a game?

It's not clear what you mean. Generally speaking, multiplayer games are usually turn-based games or realtime games, and SmartFoxServer supports both.

[Lapo]

Really what i am asking is, what different methods are being used to create these multiplayer games? What options does one have if they want to create such a game?

95% of Flash multiplayer games are based around the client / server architecture, where a central server (SFS, for example) coordinates the events of all clients and allow multi user interaction.

P2P is more complex because and you need to distribute a client/server system yourself with the game, making it a desktop application, not a web app. Additionally you need to support specific platforms (Mac, Win, Linux etc...)

They are 2 very different approaches and the former is definitely more popular

[alcho]

Ah, thank you Lapo, thats exactly what I wanted to hear.

A month or so ago I proposed I was going to be using the SFS in my uni project. Its in its very early stages still. I asked becuase I wanted to justify myself for using a client/server based connection.

Thanks again

Alcho

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[Tom]

actually...as3 has opened the doors to a lot of new possibilities.

you still are limited by actionscript's security/sharing/sandbox -- whatever you want to call it. but people are finding ways around that even.

i would not be at all surpirsed if you could get a peer to peer game in actionscript3 ... people already were working to develop remote desktop applications with as3 so why not?

however i think smart fox server is a better approach -- especially if you want more than 2 players...AND despite some of the growing pains i'm having, i'm finding SFS to be VERY good and easy to use.

[Lapo]

i would not be at all surpirsed if you could get a peer to peer game in actionscript3 ... people already were working to develop remote desktop applications with as3 so why not?

There's still a limit ... the flash player is a client technology, so it's not possible to create applications that act as a server (unless you use third party software, but in that case you would break the portability and the ability to run in the browser)

[potmo]

after building some twenty games with multiplayer mode using only p2p im convinced that thats not the best solution.

When you dont have a server no one is the judge so it makes it easy to cheat. If you tamper with the data between the clients you can't tell who did it. Was it after it was sent on the senders machine, or before it was recieved on the receivers machine or none of them?
If you have a server that verifies all data you will know where the link is broken.

You can also save all actions on a server.
Like if you are playing chess with someone and one of you loses the connection the server can save all moves and you can resume it later.

You can also make all rules on the server so all moves must be verified by the server.

Like in Scrabble. Can I lay "Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis"? Ask the server whitch makes a database lookup and it will tell you "yepp!".
Thats better than sending a whole dictionary to the client so it can look it up itself.

The downside of using a server instead of p2p is that you will never get as good latency. Ping times will always be better using p2p. But that doesnt matter. And that is the only downside.

So vote server!