Book Image

GameMaker Programming By Example

By : Brian Christian, Steven Isaacs
Book Image

GameMaker Programming By Example

By: Brian Christian, Steven Isaacs

Overview of this book

This book is excellent resource for developers with any level of experience of GameMaker. At the start, we’ll provide an overview of the basic use of GameMaker: Studio, and show you how to set up a basic game where you handle input and collisions in a top-down perspective game. We continue on to showcase its more advanced features via six different example projects. The first example game demonstrates platforming with file I/O, followed by animation, views, and multiplayer networking. The next game illustrates AI and particle systems, while the final one will get you started with the built-in Box2D physics engine. By the end of this book, you have mastered lots of powerful techniques that can be utilized in various 2D games.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Client/server multiplayer networking


This next section will cover multiplayer networking in your game. Note that this is an advanced topic, both in general and in relation to the other topics. But we'll prepare you for it. You'll first have to learn some terms, which we'll explain, so that it won't be hard to understand how what we're doing works when we start writing the code. Without further ado, let's begin!

Networking terminology

Here is some networking terminology to familiarize yourself with before beginning to write your code. There's some more information for each we'll tell you later, but for now you just need to have a basic understanding of these things:

  • Buffer: This is a region of system memory allocated for you to read and write to, and send in packets/datagrams when used in networking.

  • Packet: This is the data sent over a network when talking about TCP.

  • Datagram: This is equivalent to a packet, but for UDP.

  • Transmission Control Protocol (TCP): This is a reliable, connection-based...