Idea concerning multiplayer games..

How do I...?
#1

I’ve had this new little idea concerning a multiplayer game.
Basically it’s not about the game itself, but about the way how to achieve it.

This is what I’ve been thinking about:

Let’s say player 1 (the host of the game) starts a game where he can drive a car around. Maybe something like
the racing example included with Game Develop.

Now, he asks a buddy to join his game and so his buddy does.
Once the 2 are playing the game, player 1 controls the direction of the car and player 2 can shoot bullets, which originate from the car.

Now, what if the data exchange between the two would be minimal?
What if, and that’s a big if, player 2 sends nothing more than the coördinates of his mouse pointer, as to tell the server what to aim at when player 2 is shooting.
And what if player 2 sees nothing less than a copy, an exact port of player 1 his screen?

You might think of this as a video stream. Player 1 streams what he’s seeing to player 2. One image after another.

Now the questions are:
-How smooth would it run for player 2.
-Is this possible at all within Game Develop.

If it would be smooth and if this would be possible within Game Develop, then we might have an easier way to create multiplayer games. Because everything is calculated and rendered on the host computer. It’s basically like creating a single player game, with the difference that only a small set of data is influenced by the input
of the client computer.

Tell me if I’m wrong, because I’m just full of crappy ideas and I’m always willing to learn.

#2

You’ll probably just want to stream only necessary coordinates and stuff, you would want to synchronize stuff rather than stream video, streamed video quality isn’t good and it’s much more efficient computationally just synchronizing the scenes.
Images and video take a lot of data (doubt it’s realistically possible to stream them like that and have it work well and look good), a few coordinates and object IDS, not quite so much.

Just have player 2 send mouse coords, and player 1 send car location and rotation, enemies locations and stuff to player 2 . (Then you’ll need each of the players to read the data and stuff.)

Hope this helps!

#3

The conception of a lot of multiplayer games is indeed to make the “clients” to send only key pressed basically, then let the “server” run the game, and then send back to “client” the position/angle and every data needed for the objects.
( Or as MillionthVector said : Just have player 2 send mouse coords, and player 1 send car location and rotation, enemies locations and stuff to player 2. )

A video stream could be a really easy solution indeed, but it is not feasible currently with Game Develop, and with this solution we can only send to client the exact view of the server ( It’s ok for a basic game where the two players are always visible, but not for a more advanced game. ).