Player.IO - New Multiplayer API for Flash AS3

[tidenburg]

http://playerio.com/

If any of you can remember the Multiplayer API from Nonoba a while ago but never gave it a spin because of its whole forced-lobby thing, this could be the thing for you.

A powerful and easy to use foundation for building online games.

Player.IO makes it easy and fun to build scalable web games, by providing easy to use services game developers.

We're focused on making the jobs of dedicated developers easier, by providing tools and services that are very easy to use, yet also flexible enough to be used in a wide variety of ways.

Player.IO is built on a strong foundation: the first version of our game server and other technology was put in production in 2004, and has since been used for a lot of games both commercial and open-source and to drive the backend of www.nonoba.com, a social gaming community for flash games.

At the moment it's completely free to use but, even when the beta period is over, you can still have up to 500 concurrent users at once without having to pay - way more than enough if you're just toying with the concept.

I've just started toying about with it and so far it's looking pretty decent - much more flexible than before and not having a forced lobby makes it a sweet deal.

Yes, I do realise how big of an advert this seems but meh - MP used to be asked about quite a lot here so I don't think it can do any harm.


Tiden

[bluemagica]

hey, thanks for this! This looks great....

[rumblesushi]

How does it perform? In regards to both lag and CPU usage.

And what is the cost for much higher volumes of simultaneous users?

[tidenburg]

How does it perform? In regards to both lag and CPU usage.

Here is an example from one of the creators, Chris. It's an update from the original version. If you code the client properly (to take latency into account) then it all works great.

And what is the cost for much higher volumes of simultaneous users?

http://www.playerio.com/pricing/

[rumblesushi]

Interesting. I've been considering an out of the box package for multiplayer games in Flash, and serverside stuff really isn't my thing, I'm only good at programming things that are related to visuals.

I just had a go on the demo. The lag was bad, the opponent was lagging about all over the place, then dropped, but it could have been a particularly bad connection. I'll have another go later.

The CPU usage was hovering around 25%, difficult to tell how much of that was server related though obviously.

I do know that from playing "Tanki" a couple of times, there was barely any lag at all, and most of the players are Russian, and I'm in England.

I'll have another couple of goes, and see it performs better.

[tidenburg]

How are you synchronising your players? I'm using the following to obtain latency:

connection.addMessageHandler("TimeEcho", function(m:Message, dlt:Number){
                if(deltas.length < 10){
                    deltas.push(getTimer() - dlt);
                    connection.send("TimeCheck", getTimer());
                } else {
                    var runTot:Number = 0;
                    for each(var i:Number in deltas){
                        runTot += i;
                    }
                    runTot *= 1/20;
                    trace("2Latency is at " + runTot + "ms");
                    lag = runTot;
                    connection.send("TimeComp", lag, myName);
                    localPlayer.setDetails(myName, lag);
                    addGameHandlers();
                }
            });
            connection.send("TimeCheck", getTimer()); 

I also use time differences to move my players and then add on the lag if the player has just updated their speed, etc.

[catapop]

hi. I saw the samples they give on their site. I have a question. where is the function function sendMessage(message:Message):void implemented ? from the Connection interface in playio dir?

[rumblesushi]

Tidenburg, actually I haven't tried it myself, I was just talking about the demo

I've been really busy recently, but I'll give the demo another go, and see if the laggyness I experienced was an aberration