Master server

By -

The new master server code is up and running!

In Dog Fight we used the Unreal 4 engine, which provides its own master server, which I assume is located at Epic HQ somewhere. But Godot has no such built in feature.
I came up with the interesting idea of using IRC as my master server as I noticed many free IRC servers. I hobbled together a master server implementation based on IRC by implementing the IRC protocol in Godot. I found this took a long time to connect to the IRC servers as there was quite some handshaking going on.

Sometime later, my brother stumbled across a great Godot plugin written by vurpo, which adds C++ support for the Matrix IM protocol. I then dropped this plugin into my project and have had only chat support for a long time, and this caused my IRC plugin (and hence the master server code) to become broken.

Seeing that I have had some time recently, I decided I wanted to finally get this sucker working again so I don't have to keep joining my multiplayer games by punching in a LAN ip. I also realize that having a good master server and chat implementation is vital for a multiplayer focused game, so it is of the ut most importance.

Over the last few days and today I have finally got something hugely improved on this front. Seeing as ping functionality is not a simple thing to do (although I may add it in future) I have decided to include the ability to see which country and city a server is hosted in so people can find servers situated near to them. This was suprisingly easy to implement and I am happy with the results!

Catch you all next time!

Popular posts from this blog

Trains & Things Official Announcement

By -
Image
Build a logistics company from the ground up using trains, planes and automobiles in this real time multiplayer focused economic strategy game. Featuring Multiplayer via internet and LAN Real time economic strategy Manage a logistics company Build railways, airports and roads Transport numerous goods to meet supply and demand Custom map and mod support Media Head on over to the Trains & Things website to see some full sized screenshots. Connect with the community @bitshift we have been working hard on developing Trains & Things . We are wanting to open up our development to you, the public, so that you can stay in the loop and contribute. We want to form a community around our game, we want you to take what we make and modify it, add to it, have input in to it. So, follow us on Twitter or Facebook where we are currently posting monthly blogs. Or join us on our matrix channel #bitshift:matrix.org. Looking Forward  ...
Read more

Open-sourcing Trains & Things (and our other projects)

By -
Today we have some exciting news! We are open-sourcing Trains & Things, as well as all our other projects. As many of you may have noticed, development of Trains & Things has crawled to a halt. A few things have contributed to this. Firstly, me and my brother (that is the whole bitshift team infact) have both recently got married so our free time to work on hobbies has been reduced significantly. Then we have been stuck waiting for Godot 4.0 (in particular GDScript 2.0) to become stable enough to use. As a result, we have decided to open up all our repositories to the public so that they might be able to finish what we likely cannot. Although we will possibly tinker on our projects from time to time we simply do not have the time we once had. The easiest way to find the repositories is to head to our website: http://bitshift.rf.gd/ Down in the footer you will see a link to GitHub and GitLab which will take you to view all the bitshift repositories. Our bigger repos are stored...
Read more

Post Kickstarter

By -
Image
Well, the Kickstarter is finally over and the results have been abysmal. We only had a hand full of backers, so thank you to those people. The Stats Lets look at some stats: In the last month, we have had about 1,400 people come to our Kickstarter page with only 12 people following through - a conversion rate of 0.857%. Reddit indicates that 43,800 people viewed our adverts, with 507 clicks - a conversion rate of 1.158%. Youtube indicates that 29,000 people viewed our adverts with only 29 clicks - a conversion rate of 0.1%. Twitter failed to even launch the advertising campaign and our attempts to reach out to them fell on deaf ears. Also our attempts to reach out to the gaming press also mostly fell on deaf ears with the exception of gaming on linux .  From my research a conversion rate of about 1-2% is normal. What now? We have taken the last month to reflect and pester the press and twitter (with no luck). We lack the funding to be able to complete Trains ...
Read more