Coronium Core - Application server/plugin for Corona developers

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#21

Hi,

First off, thank you all for the support and nice comments, really makes it worth the effort.

Just to quickly clarify the differences on the products:

TL;DR - Coronium Core should not be installed with other products.

Coronium Core is an all-in-one server heavily geared towards data-driven applications. It’s very well suited for business style applications, but there are plenty of uses in the game space as well. With the addition of Pages, it offers some unique interfacing to your applications via the web. Core is not a real-time server, but with Mongo you could build turn-based games quite easily that will perform very well due to the speed of the server. Core should be kept as a stand-alone install and can not be mixed with the other products.

Coronium SkyTable shares some minimal concepts under the hood with Core, but it is not built on top of it. It’s a much more streamlined install and code base, and less evasive server wise as Core is. Core and SkyTable can not run on the same server together. Core provides the same functionality through its Data module, in a more robust fashion.

Coronium ChatterBox uses an entirely different engine from Core and SkyTable, and is a real-time TCP messaging server. Best suited for real-time chat, it can also be used as a message transport for gaming, though the API is more general in nature. While SkyTable and ChatterBox can run on the same server, Core and ChatterBox should not be installed together.

In regards to real-time gaming, Coronium Versus , which is in its testing and documentation phase, builds on top of ChatterBox to provide a gaming specific API which can be implemented server-side using Lua. Because you are able to build code on the server-side, it is considered an “authoritative” game server, which has many great benefits. I’m hoping that Versus will see a general release near the end of October.

I hope this helps clear up some questions. In essence SkyTable and ChatterBox are the lighter equivalents to Core and Versus.

-dev

#22

@Delephant

Thanks for clearing things up somehow. In a later posting in another thread you mentioned that versus, right now, is aimed at turn based games, so I guess it would not fit the realtime requirements?

@Roaminggamer

Right now I use Autolan as my focus are local users within the same room and I ideally need as fast as possible reaction times while I can get away with extremely low bandwidth - f.i. watch objects appear on display and when a special one appears, be the first who touches/grabs it. I’ll try Coronium (ChatterBox) later on when I have some more of the gamemodes implemented and if it still feels good enough while playing I’ll happily add an option to play with someout further away :slight_smile:

#23

I remember reading that too. @Delephant said “At this time, Versus is turn-based and only supports two player games.”

Link to thread.

#24

Hi,

To clarify (I hope), ChatterBox and Versus operate in real-time. As in the players/clients are connected in a “room” together for the entirety of the session. in the case of Versus, the turn-based aspect is more specific to the server-side API. But, you could certainly roll over the “turns” as quickly as the server could handle. This is specific to Versus because of its authoritative nature.

ChatterBox does not have an authoritative element, so messages are immediately broadcast to the room in which they are sent. This operation is as quick as any TCP messaging would be based on the given resources. This is in essence a non-turn-based system, which would lead me to believe that you could possibly create a game like @elifares is talking about, the only issue is that in that type of game there are number of other factors to be considered that don’t have much to the with actual messaging, this link here has a good overview of what those issues can be. In most cases an authoritative system is the way to go.

I focus on the “turn-based” word when describing Versus because that is the only type of development I have done with it. I can’t say for certain that it would be capable of a more straight forward real-time system, only because I have never tested it in that way. Often people point to the UPD protocol as better for that, but this has been debated. A handful of AAA games use TCP, like WoW and others. But you have to utilize the concepts in that link I mentioned above. In general an action type game should probably use UDP, but neither Versus nor ChatterBox are built on that protocol.

Could these engines handle both turn-based and non-turn-based gameplay? It’s possible. But I don’t specifically mention that, because I don’t have any testing to back that up. I wouldn’t feel comfortable promoting it as such, without being certain through my own experience.

Hope that helps.

-dev

#25

Thanks for the additional information - clears things up a lot.