Libertine Online is going to be a freetime project based on the gamedev 4E6 Contest entry Libertine. Its a space trade simulation with lot's of dogfights and strategy. Ships are put together using single modules. Each with different capabilities and functions, so that the player can build huge battleships, transporter, small figther, ore facilities or even space stations out of single modules. Libertine Online will be available on Linux and Windows. The used libraries are: OpenGL, Zoidcom, probably ZThreads and FMOD or OpenAL.

So far for the theory. Right now, I try to understand the Zoidcom callbacks, the architecture of all this and how to implement all the existing code snippets into the client/server communication.

Neat. Sounds similar to where I wanted to go with my private project once

Wow. That's a bit much for a network-newby like me. But there is at least a source forge entry now. After reading the manual the second time (is there one in German?) I had to redesign everything again. Is it alowed to post some status reports of Libertine Online here? If not check out http://sourceforge.net/projects/libertine/. There will be some CVS traffic in the near future (have vacation now).

Of course, post what you like I'm interested in your progress and the difficulties you are facing.

...after one month of reading and asking stupid questions the first sync is done. See here the planets on the server (left) and the synchronized planets on the client (right). Usually I wanted to send the xyz coordinates through the net, but I found a much more smarter way to sync - just by sending the server time. This is possible, because the xyz coordinates of celestial bodies are a function of time. Because of the very slow movement of the objects in the final version, hopping planets due to lags will (hopefully) be not so very often.


Shot at 2008-10-17

Yet another idea. But I'm not sure, if this is feasable or not. The synchronization of planets works so fine that I thought to make it similar with my module effects. For info: Spaceships are made of modules (cockpit, engines, container). They have lots of properties, some of them integer, some of them float. My idea was to merge all values into one variable (let's say integer) Imagine the variable range is from 1 to 10 for hit points, level, connection settings, and lots of others, too. Hit points times 1000 plus level times 100 plus connection settings times 10 would lead to one unique value for three settings. Now my question, the number of bytes passed through the net is probably not less but I would send only one information instead of three. Is this approach worth trying? I mean, if I could squeeze the module properties calculated by the server into 5 to 10 variables instead of 100 variables, this method should be much more bandwidth friendly, shouldn't it?

Yes a little bit You can also write a custom replicator that packs your data efficiently by writing integers with <8 bits to the stream, or you could use events instead of variable replication where you can pack your data with bitstreams, too.