Game lobby?

Question

I want to make a sort of game lobby for a chess game. After two computers have a connection with eachother I guess it wouldn't be much harder than just sending a string from one computer to another but the problem lies in showing who wants to play and getting the IP address of that person (I can't possible expect from the user to know the other person's IP, that wouldn't be very user-friendly).

Personally I thought of having the names and IP's of the potential players on the Internet. When the user wants to play a game against someone, the program just adds the name and IP of the user, reads the rest of the names and shows them. When the suer has selected a person to play with a request for a game is then send etc...

I thought that a database placed online would do this (which should be free, easy access to it with a program and doesn't require my computer to be on all the time) but so far I had no success...

Or maybe there's another way? How do other games have multiplayer? (note: I'm not going buy anything (soft- or hardware))

Mahesh Chand · Answer

Yes if your server goes down users won't be able to talk to each other. Yes server needs to be running all the time if you want your users to be online all the time. As Mike suggested if you compunter-to-computer direct communication you can do it using TCP/IP but for that both computers have to open communication ports and have to give each other their IP information.

Roy S · Answer

But if I would have a server wouldn't that make the multiplayer completely dependent of it running? Do I need to have a computer (or something else?) turned on at all times or are there other ways to do something like that?

Mike Gold · Answer

Most multiplayer games do require a server with an IP address (example world of war craft). The client code can talk to the server which maintains the chess game and all of its states. The clients would ask the server for info sign up for a new game etc. Most of the code would be on the server. The client just needs to be a UI for the game. If you move a piece it is communicated to the server via http or tcp or some protocol. The server could update the client. If you use a messaging system such as MSMessage Q or some open source messaging system like MassTransit you could use this to handle all your communications and move notifications. Or you could do something more crude where the client is constantly polling the server if a move has been made by the other player. It is possible to do a peer to peer game without going through a server but its a lot more complicated. If both players know each others IP address they could hook up to two fat clients that know how to play the game but you would probably still need some sign up mechanism and this would require a server who maintains the players ips. Microsoft has a peer-to-peer solution in WCF so you could utilize this technology. Or you could just write some lower level tcp communication through .NET remoting or using the tcp library.

Mahesh Chand · Answer

For multi-players games communications or applications like chat (MSN Yahoo Messanger etc) there is a Server between the players. Server manages the communication and knows IP login and other details about the players. You can do interaction between two computers (players) but that would not be good b/c players have to know each others machine details that is just not feasible. Try Networking section of this site (Left bar from home page) to see some server based applications. Good luck!

Roy S · Answer

I see no bump button and my topic is getting buried under a pile of other topics (this is pretty important to me)... BUMP