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

Introducing the Pong project

Welcome to yet another project for our fake indie game development studio, network engineer! This time, we need to make the onboarding of our next project.

We have a Pong game that we think we can turn into a competitive online multiplayer game with some leaderboards and all this cool stuff. Your core task here is to make its core features playable by two players through a network. Let’s understand what we have currently so we can point out what you going to modify.

How the player paddles work

The players’ paddles are the most important thing in our project. They are the only thing players actually control and, as such, they are the main way players interact with the game. By moving them, the players can bounce the ball off to the other player.

Let’s take a brief look at the Paddle scene. For that, open the res://07.developing-online-pong/Paddle.tscn scene. Its scene tree structure looks like this:

Figure 7.1 – The Paddle scene’s node hierarchy
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