Hey everyone,
Just a quick question about the development of any multiplayer game. Is it better to start with the multiplayer coding and implementation and then build the game around that, or can you make an offline game first and convert it to online without much re-coding or headache?
Thanks in advance
It is best to develop your game with multiplayer in mind from the beginning.
This. Multiplayer permeates through every aspect of the game. I’ve tried porting a couple of single player games to multiplayer. It ends up being a hack job that touches almost the entire code base.
The approach from CIV 4 is a good idea. Everything is treated as multiplayer. Playing on your own simply creates a dummy server locally. Each AI is a seperate ‘player’ that sends commands to the server.
UNet works pretty well with this ‘everything is multiplayer’ paradigm. But it has to be structured in from the start.
Thanks for the info, good pointer on Civ 4. I will keep that approach in mind.