hello i’m new to this and game dev in general and i’ve been wondering, i’ve been meaning to make a competitive fighting game using Gdevelop but i’m not sure how to handle multiplayer servering, matchmaking etc etc, i’ve seen a lot of fuss about THNK and i’m just wondering if it’s capable of doing something like that or would i have to figure that out myself/use a third party software?
…kind of?
Generally, THNK is in early alpha and will have breaking changes in future updates so I don’t really like to recommend it yet, however it might still be amongst the best solutions for you at the moment.
THNK is good for your kind of game, because:
- THNK is authoritative, meaning everything is verified by a “server” game instance, which is good for competitive games as you can provide one of your own as a “referee” to properly decide who won and lost in a game
- THNK doesn’t impose any limits in theory to your server TPS, so you can have a high tickrate server for high accuracy in the fast paced combat
- THNK uses a compact, schema based, delta based synchronization protocol and binary channels for transport, which allows for much more lightweight network usage than what you’d typically be able to do yourself with GDevelop
However, it is not a silver bullet either:
- Right now, it isn’t that simple to host servers without having a normal GDevelop game instance running on a machine with a screen
- THNK is remaining fairly generic, and thus does not implement the pretty constraining rollback based networking which is popular in some fighting games, you have to implement it yourself if you want that
Note: These are general GDevelop issues, not THNK issues, you’ll meet them whether you use THNK or not.
Generally I don’t see THNK limiting you, it should only make it easier to add higher quality networking to your game. Generally, there is no good alternative at the moment.
welp, if might not be a silver bullet but it seems like it’ll be a great help! thank you for the info! i really appreciate it
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