Need Help with Creating 2D TOP-DOWN Open World MMO

[bpp]

Hi everyone,

i would like to ask if any one stumbled upon a good tutorial or an article about creating an open world MMO top down 2D game in which the map changes as players build houses etc in game.

i'm using javascript but i would like a tutorial/book/article in any programming language just to get the principles and the logic behind building a game like that.

[mattstyles]

Hi @bpp, welcome to the forums

Have a search around a bit, there are plenty of posts asking for resources on creating multiplayer games.

The general approach is to use websockets to create a duplex connection between clients and a single server. This allows the server to receive client updates i.e. Client A has created a House at [10, 15] and then propagate that state change to all clients i.e. Place House belonging to Client A at [10, 15].

This is a server-authoritive appoach i.e. the server is the sole arbiter of game state. Clients 'peek' at that state and request changes to it.

Most multiplayer games take this approach. Dealing with network latency is tough.

There are alternative approaches, such as peer-to-peer connections, these, in theory, are very attractive, but, they are very tough to get right. Interestingly, there is a bit of a shift towards more P2P things being available on the web i.e. people are nervous about Facebook or Twitter holding data in their server-authoritive model, blockchain is an example where data isn't stored in one single place but is instead distributed. Distributed computing is not a new concept at all, its incredibly attractive, but, tough to get right.

Good luck with your project.

https://github.com/mozilla/BrowserQuest is old but still a good example of a server-authoritive 2d top-down MMO. Note that I'm pretty sure browserquest predates websockets (browser support has only become ubiquitous relatively recently, last couple of years) so there are newer technologies that could be adopted, but, largely, the principles are the same.

[bpp]

Thanks for the answer, ill do some searching in here as well.

[que]

Hi bpp,

I'm working on something like that, which uses websockets (SignalR).