Out of your diagram, it appears to be like such as you solely wish to write sport logic and possibly a bit little bit of presentation/UI, and are searching for a chunk of middleware to deal with the remainder.
The aim of a sport engine is to permit designers to give attention to writing the distinctive sport logic of their sport, and the engine takes care of the remainder. Subsequently, the factor that’s most probably to unravel your drawback here’s a sport engine.
However sport engines take management over this system circulation away!
Any middleware that solves your drawback right here will need to take management of this system circulation. You will be unable to put in writing a program that begins with int fundamental(void) and which makes use of networks except you write your individual netcode.
The rationale for that is that netcode for a MUD imposes a bunch of necessities on this system’s circulation, and adhering to these necessities is precisely what makes netcode arduous.
Internet-code is at all times multi-threaded
A MUD server wants to have the ability to obtain new log-in requests at any time, and keep the state of every connection. It additionally must obtain enter from already linked gamers, and actively keep the connections with gamers who will not be presently sending enter (to detect after they get disconnected ungracefully).
Each implementation of this that I’ve seen or labored on has used threads. One thread listens for brand new connections, every already energetic connection will get a thread, and the sport logic runs on yet one more thread.
Internet-code is a large number of difficult edge instances, all totally different
Quite a lot of issues can occur while you attempt to obtain knowledge on a socket. Possibly you get the info you anticipated. Possibly you get knowledge you did not count on (like a hacker testing your defenses by sending malformed packets). Possibly you aren’t getting knowledge in any respect as a result of the connection is gone. In case you write your individual netcode, you must resolve deal with every of those instances. In case you use an engine, you will have out-of-the-box options that simply work, primarily based on business commonplace practices.
You’ll most likely must persist character/account knowledge
Your gamers will most likely disconnect and reconnect. Generally this will probably be for network-related causes, however very often as a result of people must sleep. Dealing with accounts and authentication your self will take so much longer than you suppose it’ll.
Are there engines that do not prohibit my sport logic?
Sure, tons. At a fast search, I discovered TinyMud-Server which appears fairly near what you are searching for – however it’s a whole program that you simply add your code to, not only a piece of middleware you can hyperlink with.
If that does not meet your wants, there’s dozens of different engines on the market. A google seek for mud server engine c++ will flip up a couple of hits.
What if I actually do wish to write my very own?
In case you’re actually trying to write your individual server, I might advocate the next:
- Allocate sufficient time to be taught. Going from “what’s a socket?” to “writing a MUD from scratch” will take greater than every week, and possibly greater than a pair months. (It took me two years, however I wrote a few different video games in between.)
- Write a TCP echo server. Comply with a tutorial for making a easy one-connection-at-a-time TCP echo server and consumer. There’s plenty of such tutorials on the market: seek for “TCP echo server tutorial C++” to get began.
- Broaden that server to a number of connections. As soon as you have created a one-connection-at-a-time server, the subsequent step is to deal with a number of purchasers.
hearon one thread,obtainon one thread per consumer, and each time a message is available in, submit it to a queue the place one other thread will see it andshipit again to every consumer. - Flip it right into a chat server with accounts and sign-in. Add a sign-in course of to your preliminary connection and prepend every message that will get re-sent with the account title.
- Convert the
shipthread into your sport logic. Upon getting the above all completed, it needs to be simple to show it right into a MUD by changing the principle “ship message” thread.
