MondoCloud: Multiplayer, Chat, Lobby Solution for Developers

Community Showcases
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

OVERINTERACTIVE MEDIA INC. LAUNCHES NEW ONLINE MULTIPLAYER SERVICE: MONDOCLOUD

Integrate the MondoClient into your game to get chat, lobby systems and multiplayer games in minutes.

July 14th 2010, OverInteractive Media. Inc. (OMI) is proud to announce the launch of MondoCloud, a real-time messaging and server side logic client for online games. Known for designing cutting edge tools that drastically reduce development and deployment time for online social games, OMI has responded to the growing demands of independent and commercial game developers looking for easy, fast, affordable and scalable multiplayer server-side logic. More excitingly, MondoCloud will not only support multiple platforms such as UNITY, HTML5 and FLASH but do so cross platform in real-time. A demonstration of this technology in action is available at the newly released website http://mondocloud.com.

Living up to their corporate mantra, “You concentrate on making great games. We’ll concentrate on making great tools to support them,” MondoCloud will also integrate with OMI’s existing social game platform, dimeRocker. OMI’s popular self-publishing platform known as dimeRocker, currently provides a turn-key API designed to enable independent game developers to deploy, monetize and grow traffic for their games across the social web (Facebook, mySpace, etc.), Delivering an ever-growing selection of tools that allow developers to deploy and monetize their content, dimeRocker and MondoCloud will work together to improve, and grow online social content organically better then ever before.

What Can MondoCloud Do?

Currently in an early Alpha stage, MondoCloud comes with a rich set of features that allow developers to quickly and easily develop multiplayer social games in a scalable manner, complete with server side logic. An overview of the features that will be made available during this Alpha release are:

  • User to User Chat
  • Lobby Systems
  • Multiplayer Message / Turn Based Game Logic
  • Server Side Logic
    Service Highlight
  • Increased security for games, with the game logic on the server
  • Works with Unity, HTML5 and Flash (See our demo of a cross platform chat lobby at http://mondocloud.com)
  • Will power dimeRocker.
  • Server-side scripts written in JavaScript

MondoCloud is FREE during Alpha!!

Currently in early alpha, OMI is looking for interested developers to provide feedback while using this service. As new features are made available, ALPHA applicants will receive personal one on one development support from the MondoCloud team when integrating and running the MondoClient. You can apply by signing up for our announcements page at http://mondocloud.com

Get Started with MondoCloud

  • Sign up for announcements on the web site.
  • Visit the MondoCloud facebook page
  • Visit our blog (mondocloud.wordpress.com)

About OverInteractive Media Inc.

OverInteractive Media (OMI) is a privately-held company located in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Led by a team of seasoned pros, they are the force behind:

dimeRocker - a self-publishing platform designed to deploy, monetize and build traffic for Unity 3D games across the social web

MondoCloud - Cloud based client that allows developers to integrate chat, lobby systems, and multiplayer server-side logic into their games in minutes.

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Hi,
I just have look at your page so basically you are making people pay every month. How the message works ? What are the different type of message. How can I apply for the alpha ? There is no link except the keep me updated ? Should I send you a email ? Is there any limits in the hosting ?

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Hello!

During the Alpha, usage is free. After the Alpha, there will be a charge based on usage. This isn’t very different than other similar services, except that with those you usually have to pay for a license and server costs. With MondoCloud you don’t have to own your own server, or purchase a license. You pay for the usage of the service.

Messages can be for chat strings, lobby information or game data. They can be used however you like. Farming games on Facebook use a message system to send the player’s action to the remote logic on the server, as an example.

The best way to sign up for the Alpha is the “Keep Me Updated” form so we can contact developers via their e-mail address.

MondoCloud is primarily remote logic and message passing (chat, lobby, etc). dimeRocker is a great way to have your game hosted for free, deployed to Facebook, and using MondoCloud. MondoCloud, however, will work regardless of your hosting service.

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Ah it’s work on remote logic system so no real-time gaming for instance ?
I’m working a on a party game and I’m really interested in your solution DimeRocker and mondoCloud but is mondocloud is fitted to my game type ?

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Remote logic is one of MondoCloud’s features. MondoCloud supports WebSockets, which operates over TCP. We have a demo on our mondocloud.com which demonstrates the real-time chatting using Unity, Flash and HTML5. The HTML5 demo is only supported by Safari 5, Firefox 4 and Google Chrome.

MondoCloud is ideal of event-based or turn-based games (farming games, traditional board games, card games), but it will also support real-time strategy games.

Both MondoCloud and dimeRocker are very flexible, and can be used to provide a number of solutions. If you have questions about what dimeRocker or MondoCloud features your game could use, please contact support@overinteractive.com.

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since your email don’t work or you don’t answer to any I’ve sent I’ll ask my question here

Is the data packet transmission overhead small enough to allow multiplayer FPS games to run smoothly?

The thing is the game I’m building is a party based game where players run around a level and interact with each other in real time. That means you get to see the player as he moves. So the packets should be transmitted and received in as little time as possible, in the 1 ms/kb or faster rate. Better yet, could you tell me the average transmission speed for a packet with say 10KB of game specific data?

cheers

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For some reason when I tired the unity chat one it was coming out backwards so I had things like this. tahc siht ot emoclew. What meant to say is Welcome to this chat :?

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Mr.Sheogorath, we’ve not seen that, but it sounds interesting.

Sueds, sorry about that missed e-mail. Don’t worry, it does work, and we will answer. :slight_smile:

To answer your question, no, this is not ideal for FPS games. As we develop more prototypes and demos, we’ll be adding more speed/load test results. Right now this service is focused on messages-per-second, rather than the transmission speed for an FPS game.

This service is ideal for Lobby and Chat rooms for your games, as well as developers who want server-side logic for games, or multiplayer turn-based/message-based games.

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I’m concerned about pricing. Most specifically, with server-side logic and in-game calculations. Let’s say the “server” is doing ~ 60 updates a second.

Let’s assume we are sending out a message every update (updating movement, money, experience, health, etc), so we’re looking at ~ 60 messages sent per second to each player. If you’re in a 5 v. 5 game, that’s 600 messages, or 6.0 cents per second. If the average game lasts about 10 minutes then that’s about 36.0 dollars per 5 v. 5 game. If you are in a 1 v. 1 game, that’s about 7.2 dollars per game.

Unless I’m miscalculating here, your alternative is insanely expensive. If only 25 1 v. 1 games were played each day, assuming each game lasted roughly 10 minutes, we’d be looking at a $5,400 bill per month.

That’s a lot. :wink:

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I was concern also about that but apparently it wont happened since it’s more for turned base or rts game which don’t update their date at every call. Also you update the information more than 60 time per second if you want your game to runs smoothly. I Don’t thnik monon cloud is mature enough to deal with fps or realtime based gameplay. But I’ll follow this project since I4m very interested in it.

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It’s clear that our messaging is a bit…cloudy. :wink:

If you have a game sending 60 updates per second, then it isn’t a game for MondoCloud. This is a different type of game networking.

MondoCloud would be good for a game like Chess. Each one of your moves is sent, as a message. The average number of moves is 40 (Stats). The game would be 5 minutes. Those 10,000 messages would last 250 games, over 29 hours.

It also depends on how your game sends messages. You can cache a number of requests locally and send it all as one message to the server (such as a series of farming actions).

If you’re interested then we suggest you sign up for the Alpha so you stay in the loop with our updates. If you have any ideas and you’d like to discuss how MondoCloud will fit best with your design, contact us at support@overinteractive.com.

During our Alpha, usage is free, and our pricing isn’t concrete. As the alpha progresses and we get feedback from developers and players, there is always room to find the best solution for everyone.

12

It could work for some real-time games, depending how you decide to send the information. For instance you could do a multiplayer RTS game where the meaningful actions each player makes are sent.

So if I click a unit, it won’t send a message. But if I then tell the unit to move somewhere, it would send a message that i moved the unit.

You wouldn’t need to pay attention to the resources each player has either (unless it’s team based). So if another player spends some resources, there’s no need to send a message to everyone unless spending that resource makes a change to the playing field. For example, if I’m constructing a building and it’s costing me a few dollars per second, there’s no reason to update everyone each second. I could simply send a message saying I’m constructing a building, and another one when it’s complete.

There are ways for your game to take advantage of this system. The more you optimize when it makes sense to send messages, the more money you’d save. But if you’re looking at constantly sending the positions of objects then use Unity’s networkView or look at something like Photon. There’s no reason why you can’t use all of these methods together. Whatever makes more sense for your game.

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I see – not designed for the type of game I’m working on then! Seems very reasonable for the aforementioned things, however!

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Check out http://invaders.mondocloud.com/

This is a tech. demo of lag / real time communications. Each client is limited to 24 req/sec (sending), which is essentially 24fps.

I think in a real game you would want to send vector / movement information through the socket instead of position but the demo is ok to show the performance.

It really needs like 20+ people to really give it a good performance test. The server should be able to handle 30 to 40 people (960req/s) without even a burp.

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Hi,

I’d like to use this API for a poker game I’m making, how feasible is that and when can I get my hands on it? Are there any code examples to get me started with integration?

Also, will it work for iphone?

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A poker game is an excellent fit for MondoCloud. We’re planning to have an early alpha release ready in the next couple of weeks; the Unity package is mostly ready to go, we just need to finish up some other areas of the service and write documentation/code samples. Make sure you sign up on the website to be added to our mailing list.

MondoCloud will work well regardless of the platform. Hypothetically you could have an iPhone version, a web player, and a standalone game all communicating with each other, no problem.

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So no real time 3D shooter with Dimerocker?

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There’s no reason you can’t deploy a multiplayer FPS on dimeRocker, you simply need to use Unity’s built-in peer-to-peer networking rather than passing all messages through a central server. You can mix the services: dimeRocker for leaderboards, achievements, Facebook deployment, etc., MondoCloud for chat rooms and lobbies, and P2P networking when speed is absolutely essential.