I’m writing a simple little game for my kids – it doesn’t really matter what it does, though I couldn’t tell you anyway, since I/they haven’t quite decided yet! However, I think it will have a server component and a number of client components, and I’m looking at ways that the clients can communicate with the server.
ALL my previous experience… my entire career in fact… has involved the server element either being a database, a web server, or the two in tandem. Neither are appropriate in this case, so I’m curious as to what means I could & should use to communicate between the two.
Obviously, it would be preferable to adopt a technology or technique that I can re-use in my work, where I’m increasingly working with Windows Forms. I imagine there are 1001 different approaches I could adopt; it’s a question of sorting the wheat from the chaff.
I’ve literally just started reading about WCF, but its unclear as yet, if this service-oriented approach is what I’m looking for.
I’m being deliberately vague about what the applications will do; I expect the client will announce their presence to the server, will feed user choices up to the server, and in return, the server will periodically update the client with what is going on in the wider game. The game will be turn-based rather than real-time… and quite low-tech really!
Suggestions? Ideally, with links to good learning resources if any are known.
Conclusion:
I actually thought there might be more viable alternatives; there is Remoting (now depracated), but the consensus says that WCF is the way to go – in my case, self-hosting looks appealing.
Thanks for the responses.
It looks like you’re interested in WCF and that is a reasonable technology to use in this case.
When writing a network game the easiest approach is to use the client server approach here too. With WCF you have some different hosting possibilities, hosting in IIS or self hosting. I would go for self hosting to avoid the need for IIS on your home computers.
The service could be hosted in either a windows service or actually in one of the clients. I recommend running as a windows service. The service could very well run on one the same machine as one of the clients.
Edit:
If you want to host the server in one of the clients you could provide a menu option “start service” that starts a self hosted service on that computer (and automatically connect the client part to localhost). After the service has started you can present the computer name that you enter on the “other” computers to connect.
I would suggest to separate the service part into a separate project, then you can easily break out the service to a windows service later on if you like.
Edit2:
By the way, since WCF is driven by calls from the client you need to poll the server for changes. You can google wcf long polling or just long polling for methods to “push” messages from the server to the client.