Ok. Your game is finished.. It looks good.. But you would like to have multiplayer support in it.. How about a way to multiplayer-enable your game in less that 5 minutes?
www.opentrek.com/opentrek107rc3.exe
Some features:
- COpenApplication
Basically a direct copy of CGapiApplication with network notifications (UserOnline, UserOffline, MessageReceived etc). Check out the source code for the samples: "simpleint" and "simpleaw".
- Server and Ad hoc network support
Games built on the platform can be run both over GPRS connections and in ad hoc networks. All games work in both modes. Bandwidth can be fully controlled, and the default setting limits awareness information (user online/offline) at around 2kb/s and scales up to approx. 100 simultaneous users per server (with the inclusion of chat rooms in the next release this will be up to n users / server, and up to 100 in each chat room).
- OpenServer.exe
Why should your game has to run on someone elses server? Just start openserver.exe on your own machine and have all your clients connect to that.
- Skinnable launcher
The "ICQ-like" interface is basically a module by itself and can be fully replaced. Check out "simpleaw" for a starting point. You can even have a full screen application run as an awareness module.
License for opentrek is the same as for gapidraw. Just tell us before you release stuff depending on it to function..
To try it out: Just download and start the launcher from your start menu. To run in ad hoc mode, simply switch to "ad hoc" from the menu and start another instance of the launcher (located in the folder "secondinstance"). Note: You need the latest version of DirectX for some of the modules (simple interaction, simple awareness).
OpenTrek NG will not be officially released until we have around 10 games to back it up. We have the new Joey (also called O2 XDA) which we will use for benchmarking performance over GPRS. The launcher will also be "anonymized" before release.
Please feel free to try out and comment...
/Johan