Online Pong Example!

[pinacoladaxb]

Hello. I've just completed an example of an online action game using Lacewing. And because I just happen know everyone here loves bat-and-ball games, it's a simple game of Pong!

The events actually do get a little complicated. I added comments to the events to make them a little easier to understand. I hope this example helps however it can.

Required extensions:
Lacewing

Download Online Pong MFA

[pinacoladaxb]

Mathias and I discovered that if there's too much lag, player 1 will always score on player 2 because player 2 won't send the information that it hit the ball in time. I'll try to implement some way of predicting movement soon.

[LB]

Ahh, my solution was to have the ball be controlled by the player it was closest to. Here is RickyRombo's GwerdyPong (that I did all the coding for). It uses OINC, so I will convert it later..

The only problem is that the ball seems to backtrack if there is too mucg lag. But it's a small price to pay for the non-glitchy scoring system.

[Jacob]

This is what Lacewing Server would be good for
You'd have the ball controlled by the server, and then each player would be lagged equally.

[LB]

Then the paddles would lag on the sever end :p

[pinacoladaxb]

Ya I was originally going to have the ball switch control depending on which side of the screen it was on, and I guess that would work well. I was also thinking of predicting the ball's position on player 2's side by timing the lag, and speeding up the ball so that it would hit player 2's paddle at the same time on both screens. I'll fiddle around with it tomorrow.

[LB]

Still, it is hard to read a player's mind about where they are moving the paddle. ;P

[RickyRombo]

I also created my own pong (without LB's help) and it still had problemos

[pinacoladaxb]

Still, it is hard to read a player's mind about where they are moving the paddle. ;P

That doesn't mean I can't find where the paddle should be based on the received location and lag time. And the ball just happens to be extremely predictable. Anyways, the game works fine if you're playing off your own server with a nearby friend.

[LB]

How are you to know when a player suddenly changes thier direction? Sure, you can predict thier movement if they go up the whole time o down the whole time, but then it'd snap when the changed direction, and the lag for the message of their position would cause scoring glitches in some cases. I say it is better to have lag where it doesn't matter than where it does.