Real-Time Multiplayer in Gamelab

DragonFireGames · 2024-01-03T20:46:15+01:00

Yes, you read the title right. real time multiplayer in gamelab. If you were wondering what me and @Ravage were doing together, this is what it was. Unfortun...

person

I made a slither io a while back and I wanted multiplayer so I called upon "cdos greatest minds" tho all I got was a quest for help from ioioioio

DragonFireGames

person Interesting, could you send a link?

ackvonhuelio

DragonFireGames
i tried something like this a couple days ago with my glob library and it worked but was shitty (cuz keyvalues slow lol)

cuz its so shitty i don't think you'd be able to make a game out of it tho

DragonFireGames

ackvonhuelio Entity interpolation. Apparently, according to @Ravage scratch's cloud variables are about as slow as code.org's, that slither.io game uses interpolation to fix that.

Letti42

DragonFireGames wdym interpolation, like sending the data in chunks? if so i’ve done that with a dumb game i was testing on replit but it works really well, not sure how achievable it’d be on code.org

person

It doesn't have any multiplayer tho

DragonFireGames

Letti42 Read the keyvalues every second. Between each second slide the position of the entity between the old position and the new one to give the appearance of a smooth game.

Letti42

DragonFireGames then yeah i've done that. you just need the movements of the player sent with keyvalues in an array in a timed buffer of, let's say 300 ms (about the latency of my other game). then that array of probably 7-10 ish movements gets received by the other players and is put into an array that is constantly updating the other players' positions but at a rate RELATIVE to what the timed buffer from before was

if that didnt make sense, tldr:
time the movements, send them, receive the movements and update positions
one movement can be represented by a mouse down event. should be enough to get that smooth gameplay

Varrience

DragonFireGames While I'm not sure how many exact there are i could probably find out, just going to be a pain in the ass since i have to move redeployments, I'd assume it'd be the same as the firebase rate limit, although perhaps they've set custom stuff on there end for the config model it runs in, from my extensive modification of those files with "firefly" or it's more like a request for the key then it returns some model which then gets passed in to load the data so it's gonna be a gut guess at the current time
it should probably be around 5,000 reads / 100 seconds
and 80 writes / 100 seconds
(depending on which version there running under may vary these numbers and how there being executed)
however i think according to the "read" stuff for CDO it seems to suffer a bit more which may be some form of reading it artificially so I'd say less than < 5,000 for reads CDO isn't really meant for real time multiplayer since your "socket" is using TCP vs what would usually be used as UDP connection......
if anything a real time card strategy game may be the furthest you will be able to get to "real time" without overloading the server with users if anything you probably could get away with some Pokemon-esk game.
Best of luck with your efforts

DragonFireGames

Varrience Yeah, I've quickly discovered that it is really easy to hit that rate limit.

DragonFireGames

Letti42 That is almost exactly what I am doing, however it fails utterly and completely when changing directions.

Captain_Jack_Sparrow

I'm going to pretend to know what you guys are saying and go along with it.

Captain_Jack_Sparrow

I think you should worry about a smooth game play one you figure out the how to make it work first.
Ya know, focus on one thing at a time.

DragonFireGames

Captain_Jack_Sparrow Smoothness is a priority.

Letti42

DragonFireGames i had issues with that too, what exactly isnt working with it?

peptobepto

DragonFireGames is there some way to offload player position data to another source outside of cdo?

DragonFireGames

peptobepto Well, before the free repl shutdown on new years, you could offload it to a repl with a hacked JSON request using loadImage().

peptobepto

DragonFireGames poo

Letti42

DragonFireGames use glitch or netlify , same thing

DragonFireGames

Letti42 It is hard to predict how the player will turn in the future and then do it smoothly while still making it feel responsive.

Letti42

DragonFireGames well you need a buffer there.

think of it like a live stream on twitch or youtube. Videos are sent in chunks. When the video is received, you don't play it immediately. Otherwise, if there's any sort of delay there won't be a seamless play of the live stream for when the next chunk arrives.
In order to prevent this, Twitch and YouTube have a delay in their live stream of anywhere between just 2 seconds up to a whole minute! You need to have the same with your multiplayer game.

So, instead of immediately showing player movement, have the program wait around half a second. This creates the same "buffer" that live streaming utilizes. This may increase your latency (affect the responsiveness), so it's important to not keep it too high.
You're gonna want to append the movement in an array that, like I said before, is being run through a TIMED LOOP, so when you're mirroring user movement it appears seamless.

here's a codepen i made that might help you visualize it. Notice how the first array doesn't get too big or too small. That's because of that loop i mentioned
https://codepen.io/Letti42-the-lessful/pen/dyrMqdP