Well, I've managed to convert my old demo into a client/server application. Right now all it does is connect to the server and get a couple simple commands from the server to tell it a URL to load the world from, and set up a light. There is no interaction yet and the animated character is on the client only.

One thing I've learned is that a saved world with a landscape in it is ridiculously large; mine's nine megs. That's far too large to be loading from a server. The file compresses well, 600KiB for mine, but that's still quite large compared to the size of the PNG file I used to create the landscape (78KiB). I guess I'll need to figure out some sort of level format and load the PNG file off the server instead of loading the whole world at once. I guess I would have eventually needed to do this anyway since I want to do an animated sky and/or algorithmic 3d clouds (mentioned in a previous post), algorithmic trees and forests, etc.

I would like to be able to use Py2Play for this, but it unfortunately uses TCP and thus is not firewall-friendly. The ideal scenario would be to use UDP for everything and have each player send outbound UDP packets to every other player. I figure this could scale to a MMORPG because each player would only need to send data to players within a certain distance.

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