Corona® AutoLAN- Public Internet Multiplayer Support Beta! Join Now!

Games
#141

Hello! Been reading through this thread now and a question popped up…

How is the internet multiplayer now? Is it finished now or can it at least be used? Is it available somewhere?

We’ve been planning on integrating online gaming into our game, which is a turn based game and we’ve been experimenting with Pubnub, but it seems to get expensive once you get many players playing your game. So we stumbled upon this thread

Anyone who have any experience with this product? From what we’ve read it sounds awesome, but internet multiplayer isn’t very clear in the product website
Thanks in advance,

Edit: Purchased it. Been reading some more and from what we understand internet multiplayer does work and it’s pretty good too? Anyone who tried Pubnub and can recommend which one works best?

Thanks,
//
Mitaten [import]uid: 14018 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 100122[/import]

#142

@Mitaten
As long as Pubnub is concerned, the only disadvantage is that it is too costly as you mentioned, once the number of users increases.
It works fairly well though.

In case of Autolan, the only thing you would be needing is a server (which MY Developers themselves have plans of providing to customers) and the connections would be peer-to-peer.

So Costwise Autolan is better. WAY BETTER [import]uid: 64174 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 100169[/import]

#143

Thanks for the answer Satheesh, we decided to go with AutoLAN over Pubnub :slight_smile: [import]uid: 14018 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 100177[/import]

#144

Pubnub and AutoLAN provide solutions for different needs (I have used both). While each could be used for the same types of applications and are good products, they have different strengths to consider.

AutoLAN is peer to peer, which means that there must be a mutual connection between client and host for the duration of gameplay. This makes live, shorter, communication-rich games with a limited number of players very ideal for AutoLAN, since the connections are always as fast as the device’s connectivity make possible, and there is no cost per message (this is huge, obviously).

PubNub publishes and stores messages through a server (hence why they have to charge based on the number of them that you send) which allows for messages to be held on to, and for people to jump in and out of gameplay, making it more suitable for turn-based games (which typically requires far fewer messages as well). [import]uid: 87138 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 100193[/import]

#145

@Revaerie Excellently put.

I have been wondering.
How hard it would be to have more that 2 players in a game using Autolan? Is it even possible??? [import]uid: 64174 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 100197[/import]

#146

@Mitaten,
Thank you for your interest! We have sent you a beta invite. Please let us know if you have further questions.

@Satheesh,
Thank you for clarifying Mitaten’s questions, your help is much appreciated.

How hard it would be to have more that 2 players in a game using Autolan?
The included multipong demo can in fact connect (in theory) an unlimited amount of clients only limited by bandwidth and CPU. Additional clients become spectators. We have tested up to 6 players connected to a single server (we have 2 laptops, 2 desktops, 2 android devices, and 1 iOS device.) Under LAN conditions it works fine, not sure how it would fare on the internet but AutoLAN itself does not limit this.

@Revaerie,
Again, thanks a lot for clarifying. We wanted to ask you how well things are running on your dedicated server. How is the memory usage of the script? how about the cpu usage? Is the memory pretty stable or do we need to find some leaks?

Thanks,
M.Y. Developers
[import]uid: 55057 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 100208[/import]

#147

Is it possible to have one device host multiple servers? So that one device can play multiple sessions at once? Similar to how you can play against multiple friends on Draw Something or Words With Friends

Right now I’ve set everything up so there is only one button, you tap it and it will scan for servers, if none are found then the app will host a server, then if someone else taps the button he will obviously join that server, but problem arise when the host has hosted the server, and now wants to look for another game, if none are found is it possible to have him host another one?

Edit: And is it possible to do turn-based games with AutoLAN? One that you can shut down and then open up and reconnect to your opponents again? Again similar to Draw Something or Words With Friends [import]uid: 14018 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 100440[/import]

#148

For a future version, could you consider to make encrypted connections an option? I understand this would possibly slow things down a lot but it could be interesting to take things in this direction to allow AutoLan to be used for more than games. Just a thought. [import]uid: 11904 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 100441[/import]

#149

@Mitaten,
Thank you for your questions. What you will want is to store some data on the server side. Currently AutoLAN internet is just a matchmaker and the only data stored is IPs and Ports of servers/clients. This will require lots of data to go through the matchmaker (as opposed to p2p) and this may become use up bandwidth very quickly.

@ksan,
Not sure if lua sockets currently supports ssl. Just doing some preliminary research the only ssl support for lua involves native binary libraries. What applications do you have in mind?

Regards,
M.Y. Developers [import]uid: 55057 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 100696[/import]

#150

Wow this looks great! Cant believe its been out since January, I totally missed that!

Just bought a copy so thats my weekend taken care of :slight_smile:

Belated congrats M.Y! [import]uid: 8600 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 100812[/import]

#151

@Dell,

Thanks for your interest! Let us know if you have any questions. What kind of game are you making?

Thanks,
M.Y. Developers [import]uid: 55057 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 100815[/import]

#152

Thanks, will do! First off ill be updating “Haste”, which is a puzzle game, its iPad only at the moment with a split screen 2 player mode. Im updating it to a universal app and was going to remove the 2 player option when running on a phone, as the screen is just not big enough. Now ill replace it with wifi 2 player instead :slight_smile: [import]uid: 8600 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 100822[/import]

#153

@Dell,

Sounds great! If you are not interested in making a lobby system you can just use the client:autoConnect() function.

Regards,
M.Y. Developers [import]uid: 55057 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 100830[/import]

#154

@mydev: thanks! I followed the instructions in the pdf, but still cant manage to connect to the matchmaker service. is it running on port 51650, www.mydevelopersgames.com?

I am sure that I am pretty close :). Client gets a timeout when looking for server.

thanks! [import]uid: 90610 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 101254[/import]

#155

Hello Dingo,

Sorry about the delay. The port being used is actually 54613, seems it might have accidentally gotten changed somewhere. Please change the port and things should work properly.

To all, please ensure you copy over the files to your local machine before making any changes.

Regards,
M.Y. Developers [import]uid: 55057 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 101764[/import]

#156

thanks for your reply! i tried it with your multipong (changed the stuff thats written in the pdf), but still cant find the game. is the script still running?

(54613, www.mydevelopersgames.com);

Can u upload a working example (internet) of the multipong to the dropbox? we still can’t connect by internet.

thanks! [import]uid: 90610 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 102080[/import]

#157

Hello Dingo,

Should be fixed now! Please try it out and let us know.

Regards,
M.Y. Developers [import]uid: 55057 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 103321[/import]

#158

I will give it a try tomorrow, thanks for your support! [import]uid: 90610 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 103327[/import]

#159

AWESOME!! its working!!

you’re brilliant! was it sth in the php file?

one question: whats the capacity of the matchmaker… I mean how many could match? 100’000? is there a limit like integer, long int, whatsoever?

thanks! [import]uid: 90610 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 103331[/import]

#160

Hello Dingo,

Glad you got it working!
Not sure what the problem was but we restarted the script and it worked.

The only limit should be how much RAM there is on the server. We use an associative array on the PHP side so there should be no hard integer limit.

Regards,
M.Y. Developers [import]uid: 55057 topic_id: 19917 reply_id: 103339[/import]