We get signal!

Hmmm, I think I used this title before… Not sure. And who cares anyway? It’s Sunday evening 22:45 now, almost time to get some shut eye before heading off to work.

Before diving into my bed, I’ll write up some nice post on my progress on the Dune Networking Components, and post it when my internet connection is back up again.

At the moment, I can connect clients to the in-game lobby. It will accept their connection, and once it receives a handshake, it will return their player ID, and a list of all connected players. This needs to be expanded with a faction and a color, but that isn’t in yet.

This is how the Lobby looks like server side:

Looks pretty sweet eh(I think I broke my FPS counter… There is no way in hell that runs at 35 FPS)? Well, it’s far from done, but I’ll get to that later on. This is what the basic lobby still needs:

• Handling of disconnects
• Player colors
• Player factions

There are more things required for the lobby, such as map selection, game options(Starting credits, starting units, how do we handle starting points(fixed / random), spice blooms, etc.). But for the sake of simplicity, I don't add those in. It would only complicate things while I want to get basic networking up and running.

Don’t get me started on the client side… That one just connects and sends the handshake. Nothing else yet. That's next up.

For the networking library I’m using the Lidgren Network Library. It’s pretty awesome if you’re working in .NET. It’s extremely easy to use and does all sorts of things for you, such as internal clock synch, message re-sending, etc. Speaking of which, I should see if there's a new version out the library. The version I'm using is a few months old.

No technical details to explain to you guys yet, so you have to wait a bit longer. The cool technical details come when I start working on synchronizing the simulations.