Josh Glazer - Multiplayer Game Programming: Architecting Networked Games

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Architecting Networked Games

Joshua Glazer
Sanjay Madhav

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015950053

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ISBN-13: 978-013-403430-0
ISBN-10: 0-134-03430-9

Text printed in the United States on recycled paper at R.R. Donnelley in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
First printing: November 2015

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To Grilled Cilantro and the Jellybean. You know who you are.

Joshua Glazer

To my family for their support, and to all of my TAs over the years.

Sanjay Madhav

Networked multiplayer games are a huge part of the games industry today. The number of players and amount of money involved are staggering. As of 2014, League of Legends boasts 67 million active players each month. The 2015 DoTA 2 world championship has a prize pool of over $16 million at the time of writing. The Call of Duty series, popular in part due to the multiplayer mode, regularly has new releases break $1 billion in sales within the first few days of release. Even games that have historically been single-player only, such as the Grand Theft Auto series, now include networked multiplayer components.

This book takes an in-depth look at all the major concepts necessary to program a networked multiplayer game. The book starts by covering the basics of networkinghow the Internet works and how to send data to other computers. Once the fundamentals are established, the book discusses the basics of transmitting data for gameshow to prepare game data to be sent over the network, how to update game objects over the network, and how to organize the computers involved in the game. The book next discusses how to compensate for unreliability and lag on the Internet, and how to design game code to scale and be secure. cover integrating gamer services into and using cloud hosting for dedicated serverstwo topics that are extremely important for networked games today.

This book takes a very practical approach. Most chapters not only discuss the concepts, they walk you through the actual code necessary to get your networked game working. The full source code for two different games is provided on the companion websiteone game is an action game and the other is a real-time strategy (RTS). To help with the progression of topics, multiple versions of these two games are presented throughout the course of this book.

Much of the content in this book is based on curriculum developed for a multiplayer-game programming course at the University of Southern California. As such, it contains a proven method for learning how to develop multiplayer games. That being said, this book is not written solely for those in an academic setting. The approach taken by this book is just as valuable to any game programmer interested in learning how to engineer for a networked game.