Moving onwards …
So - ActionScript 3 does not support UDP. That’s interesting, and annoying as hell. I had hoped it would to take off some of the load and overhead of using TCP so I could do more real-time ’stuff’ with AS3, but apparently that won’t be the case. Getting 3 - 5 packets a second seems about reasonable, which should be fine, but under load I fear that would go down to 2 - 3 and then I’m starting to struggle with any kind of resolution. Heck, that’d mean that the lag on responsive actions would be huge - otherwise the client has to predict what’s happening, and when that involves other players it’s near impossible.
But that’s not a problem - I’ve decided that I’m going to do a turn-based game using real-time connectivity. The fluidity of the game will be superb - no page reloads or anything - and it still allow for some nice graphics and even real-time moving (once the tick has occured) - even battles could be played out for real.
This also allows me to develop the game without worrying nearly so much about things like timing conditions - something which could quite honestly dominate the coding for quite a while, as it’s a highly sensitive area - fail to get that bit right and you open yourself up to cheating, hacking, some huge and very hard to spot bugs, and all manner of complaints. Heck - even the “Big Boys” that develop games like Half Life get people moaning when “He missed me and then I died 5 minutes later from a laggy shot!” and the likes. No, lets use the best of what we can with Flash, and lets not use it for what it’s not meant for - for the time being!
On another note - I hope to actually start showing what I have available very soon. Because the client is no longer in C++ it means deploying it to users becomes significantly easier - I just upload it and you visit the web page! So stay tuned! 