Hello from France !

[ti7o]

Hi all,

My name is Herman. I'm working as a system engineer for about 5 years in France (sorry for any english mistakes), but keep do some programming for fun on my free time. I used to like a lot C language, but tried a lot of different ones for programming little games (Java, Python, C#, ObjC). While I've been happy (specially with pygame) with those for small Tetris like games I'm now looking for a real 2D engine for more ambitious game projects. Having downloaded and played with the examples provided, it looks like graphic wise AGen engine fits perfectly my needs. Implementation of GUI and pathfinding are also really exciting features !

The question though is about the implementation of network communication. Having browsed the online documentation it looks like the engine itself doesn't handle this. Is there a way to find some examples of using the engine inside a C/C++ program. Basically the idea would be to handle the network part, the game logic (database etc..) inside a C/C++ program and use AGen to handle the graphic part using LUA scripts. If so I think I found what I've been looking for to play with

Thanks.

[Ivan]

Hi Herman and welcome onboard!
Unfortunately, there's no public API available at the moment for using the engine from C/C++.
However, the engine supports networking through LuaSocket which is included with the engine ("Extensions/dll/socket/core.dll" and "Extensions/lua/socket/").
It depends what you want to do exactly but LuaSocket has a good number of features and I've used it myself for the hiscore system in 8-Bit Commando.
If you plan on making an online multiplayer game it might be a bit more complicated but it should work.

[ti7o]

Hi Ivan,
Thanks for your quick reply. My concern with the network part was if I decide to stick with AGen engine and spend some time to learn it, will I be able to implement several network functionalities in my projects. In the worst case, yeah you guessed it right, it could be a multiplayer online gaming, which is something I really want to dig into. But to familiarize myself with the engine and LUA I would start by creating more simple "exercises" that would involve only 2 players. If I can manage to perform network comm LUA to LUA it won't be too hard to do it LUA to C server.

Following your link I'm please to see that there is some possibilities in that respect. I'll be glad to give it a try .

[Ivan]

Hi again. Yep, that sounds like a good idea. The 'client' scripts running the game could be written entirely in AGen/Lua and the game server could be in C/PHP or whatever.
In fact, I'd be interested in seeing a multiplayer example script in Lua.
The only issue that I can think of is that since there is no multithreading in the engine, if the client has a slow connection his PC might lag.
I'm not 100% sure - perhaps this could be overcome using coroutines.

[Ivan]

You might find this useful:
http://2dengine.com/doc_1_3/gs_networking.html