Hey all, hoping you can help me with a design issue for a project I've come across. I'm currently working on a side project in director and I am utilizing the multi-user server to create a multiplayer role playing game. So far I have written server side scripts to handle the saving and loading of characters for different "accounts" which a user can create. The account creation, and character creation are in, and the server saves the data on its end to help keep character data secure.
The basic design of the game is similar to the original zelda so it will have a tile-based world, and all characters will be sprite based, and action will be similar to zelda as well, real-time. Anyways, to get to the point, from what I see (and please correct me if I'm wrong), the multi-user server is limited to scripts, and hasn't got the actual director file and all its sprites server-side to perform actions with. However, I would prefer the server to handle NPC movements, and distribute that information to the client players. The thing is, I'm not sure how I can do that, and also get the NPC's to not collide with props and parts of the world which should not be walkable. I am planning on putting together quite a few different casts, all which will hold sprite animations, props, backdrops, overlays, basically all the different world graphics, but all singled out in a way that will enable me to re-use them time after time in the game by just choosing a basic background tile, maybe overlaying a png with a path on it, adding some treasure chests, and very easily have a new tile set up. The big idea is to have basically all the graphics as generic and reusable as possible, and just layer them to make the tiles unique. For This, I will probably end up adding server-side txt files that each contain all the information for a given tile, that way the world can be added to/changed with minimal-no impact to the player in regards to downloading anything, except when new graphic content is added. My question is this. I'm looking for some feedback and ideas for how I could handle the NPC movement server side, and still have the ability for the server script to keep them out of unwalkable areas, which is what I would do via sprite collision if it were to be a single player game and/or client side. So far my basic design is that each "tile" of the game world will be a different group on the server, so as to minimize the number of messages that get distributed to only the clients in that particular tile. So this is a pretty open question I suppose and I am open to any ideas anyone has, in regards to the main issue, or other ideas you may have for the project. 1) How would you do server side NPC/Monster behavior, with the ability to avoid obstacles placed dynamically? 2) Do you have any other suggestions/ideas for a project such as this? Any and all feedback is really appreciated, and I welcome any ideas to this project, as I am going about it by myself. Also if you have any links to any multi-user server examples, preferably games please let me know, I've leeched the chat room examples to death and I'm curious how other games might do the multiplayer part of their design. Thanks! J [To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to http://www.penworks.com/lingo-l.cgi To post messages to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Problems, email [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Lingo-L is for learning and helping with programming Lingo. Thanks!]
