Castle Paradox

TMC · Posted: Sun Apr 25, 2010 2:23 pm Post subject:

Yes, try Darwine. I don't know whether anyone has previously, but the OHR works in Wine (apparently; I've never tried). What's great is that at least one of the dozens of possible combinations of 'backends' is bound to work near-flawlessly.

Wine normally recommends that you reinstall applcations from within Wine, and don't try to run Windows programs off a Windows partition because that normally won't work and may even be harmful. However this warning doesn't apply to the OHR because it doesn't use the registry, shared DLLs or store anything it needs elsewhere.
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Camdog · Joined: 08 Aug 2003 Posts: 606

I actually coded a really simple protocol for client/server communication into the engine once. It basically added plotscripting commands for connecting to a server and then reading/writing values to an array on the server. I got it working, but never went anywhere with the code because there was no good way to prevent cheating. I might have it lying around somewhere if anyone is interested in looking at it...

TMC · Posted: Mon Apr 26, 2010 6:03 pm Post subject:

Oh, you did actually code that? Could be interesting to look at your approach. I wouldn't use that fbnet library though. Chisock may be the best FB library available - seems to be really popular - but there's actually no reason to use a FB library at all.

Camdog · Joined: 08 Aug 2003 Posts: 606

Well, I looked around my computer, but I can't find the code anymore. Sorry... It really wasn't much to look at, anyway. I basically cut and paste some examples I found on the FB forums and made a couple of minor changes. I can't remember what library I used.

Suffice to say, it's fairly trivial to slap a client/server onto the OHR code base, and add a couple of plotscripting commands for them to interact. The real problem is that the OHR is not written with multiplayer in mind. In most networked games, the server keeps track of the game state and the client lets the player issue some commands, but in the OHR's case the client itself would keep track of the game state and the server would only be used to ferry messages between the players. This might be ok for a simple two or three player game where you trust everyone, but it would be so so easy to break if someone made a MMO with it.

So yeah, it was a fun experiment, but if you really want to make an MMO, the OHR is probably not the way to go.