The Battle Room from Ender's Game!

To build the project create a folder next to battle_room, maybe called build and run the following

cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ../battle_room
make

This will make

The packages required in Ubuntu include:

cmake libsdl2-dev libsdl2-image-dev libsdl2-ttf-dev libsdl2-net-dev

To start a server or play locally, just run the battleroom binary. You can edit the port in the startup.yml in then res directory to look something like this.

WorldUpdater: Server
    Port: <port of host>
    User: <your username>

To connect to a server, either edit your startup.yml to look below or edit client.yml and run battleroom client.

WorldUpdater: Client
    Host: <ip of host>
    Port: <port of host>
    User: <your username>

I'm just going to describe the various sections of the codebase here. Its pretty incomplete/messy right now.

An animation in Battle Room describes what to display for an in-game object and how it is shaped. The general structure of an animation is ...

A game world (World) is an instance in time in the game containing all the objects currently in play. Currently this includes the game objects, background objects, and the current game time in seconds. It can be copied around and serialized. Just a container for the game world, does not do any updating.

The QueryWorld Is a singleton layer on top of static copies of the world that can be queried with thread safety.

A LocalUpdatingWorld is a child class of World that can update. This is where all the game update logic is.

The QueryWorld is updated through various implementations of the QueryWorldUpdater class. They all contains ways to communicate commands to the server, register and unregister users. The simplest version of this is the LocalWorldUpdater - it just contains a LocalUpdatingWorld and runs updates on another thread. A layer on top of that is ServerConnection which just serves the local updating world to the network. The last updater is the ClientConnection which connets to a server and receives updates from it and in turn updates the query world.

So, in summary:

• Playing Locally: Use LocalWorldUpdater which contains LocalUpdatingWorld and updates QueryWorld with it.
• As a server: Use ServerConnection which extends LocalWorldUpdater and also reads from QueryWorld to serve to the network.
• As a client: Use ClientConnection which asks the server for the world and updates QueryWorld based on its response.