Hey! Does anybody know of a framework for building the serverpart of a multiplayer-game (to be run on *nix systems)? Something that handles user registration, networking and of course a custom database access? Or how do you handle this? preferably open source but that's not a requirement. Thanks.
Hey, I wrote my own server in python, which wasn't as bad as I thought it might get because python already has some quite useful networking and message streaming interfaces. (the whole code for the server is less then 700 lines) If you are going for a stateful server with sockets this would be the appropriate interface. For the iPhone-Client-Side I posted most of my code in a post on my blog, but I recon you were more interested in the server-side.
I was more worring about the the server side, but any help is appreciated. I'll certainly have a look at your blog when the time comes. I was already speculating that i'll have to write something in phyton. A language i'm not familiar with.
OpenFeint I think supports turn-based multiplayer, by passing some sort of XML state between players. If your game is real-time, it won't work though. There's no reason you have to write a server in Python, though. You could write it in C++, Java, whatever you like. The only framework I know of (I haven't researched it) is SmartFoxServer. I think you have to pay for a license, but worth a look: http://www.smartfoxserver.com/
Well I didn't know a lot of python before I wrote my server either, but python is just that easy and the frameworks are so easy to set up, that I saved a lot of time/work even though I had to learn python. I'm pretty sure even though I knew C++ and Java before, writing it in those languages would have required many more lines of code.
http://www.electrotank.com/es5.html We are finishing up our internal beta currently and will be doing an open beta very soon. Once it goes gold, you will be hard pressed to find something else that would meet your needs. Pricing is TBD but will be reasonable and competitive. Cross-platform examples will be included (server in Java, clients in AS3 and Unity that play against each other)!!! Joel
Gold! http://www.electrotank.com/es5.html I know Game Center is awesomely easy to use for 4-player multiplayer, but anything more than that and I would suggest you peek at this... I know $1k seems like a lot, but in the software engineering world, that's less than the salary for a senior developer for just one week. Think about it and you might see that $1k is a ridiculous bargain for what you're getting... assuming you need it.... And yes, I work for Electrotank. But I'm also a believer in the platform and use it for my own personal games in addition to a ton of company games.
