Book Image

The Essential Guide to Creating Multiplayer Games with Godot 4.0

By : Henrique Campos
3 (2)
Book Image

The Essential Guide to Creating Multiplayer Games with Godot 4.0

3 (2)
By: Henrique Campos

Overview of this book

The Essential Guide to Creating Multiplayer Games with Godot 4.0 guides you in exploring the built-in network API for online multiplayer games, offering practical knowledge through concrete use cases. Throughout the book, you'll assume the role of a network engineer in a fictional indie game studio, tackling real-world requests from your peers and gaining expertise in adding new network features to the studio's games. Following step-by-step instructions, you’ll go from making your first network handshake to optimizing online gameplay. You’ll learn how to sync players and pass data over the internet as you add online multiplayer features to a top-down shooter adventure game. This book puts you in a fictional game project team where you set up your first online server before advancing to creating an online chat system and transitioning local gameplay to go online. With a focus on implementing multiplayer features, you’ll create shared world adventures and learn optimization techniques to allow more players to join your virtual world. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to set up a client-server network, implement remote procedure calls (RPCs), sync node properties remotely, and optimize your games to create smooth online multiplayer experiences.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1:Handshaking and Networking
6
Part 2:Creating Online Multiplayer Mechanics
12
Part 3:Optimizing the Online Experience

Caching Data to Decrease Bandwidth

When it comes to reducing bandwidth usage and optimizing network usage in game development, there is a powerful technique that always comes to mind: caching.

Caching solves the question of why we should keep downloading the same data repeatedly when we can download it once, store it somewhere, and reuse it whenever needed. In this chapter, we will delve into caching techniques and learn how to apply them to efficiently download, store, and reuse images and other relevant data. For that, we will use a database that contains image URLs that we are going to download directly from the internet into our players’ machines.

To demonstrate the implementation of these caching techniques, we will prototype a new feature in our game project, where players will have the ability to upload custom images for their spaceships. To save time and focus solely on the network aspect of this feature, we will avoid implementing user experience and user interface...