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Showing posts from November, 2017

Stick Veterans online: Good news & Bad news

After loads of work, online multiplayer for Stick Veterans seems to be progressing very well. In fact, it is nearly complete, as showing in recent tests. Today I ran the first playtest with 3 people; we connected over Hamachi , a free VPN solution, and it pretty much went smoothly (except for some non-critical bugs). Bad news is that LAN connections might be the only thing supported , with little hope for worldwide online games. I already mentioned that in the game's web pages ( Itch.io post / Gamejolt post ) but I shall lay down the whole story here. In commercial games, online multiplayer is achieved by putting up dedicated 24/7 servers (preferably in various locations throughout the world) to which the players connect. In non-commercial games  (like Stick Veterans), we have to make do without servers, as they cost money (non-trivial amounts of it). As such, we simply allow any player to act as a server themselves, and other players connect to them. This is called