6 Replies Latest reply on Jun 16, 2009 2:13 PM by jguglielmin

    Off-topic design question

    earnest.dyke

      Greetings,


      My 13 year old son approached me yesterday and asked it I could create a web-based multiplayer game for this card game he and his friends play. My first inclination was to use an applet but then I began to wonder if I could do it in Seam. The basic requirements are as follows:


      1. Maximum of 8 players per game
      2. Unlimited number of active games
      3. Each player joins a game before play begins


      The issue I have run into is how to keep global information. I have created a stateful session bean to represent a game but how do I make sure that a player joining the game uses the same stateful bean as the other players in the game.


      Earnie!

        • 1. Re: Off-topic design question
          gonorrhea

          I've never given thought to this interesting question until now, but essentially instead of one client per session you need to model/accomodate n clients per session.


          Almost like a workflow or BPM solution?  not quite sure if you can use the same jsessionid and/or cookie from different browsers to join the same game session.


          And I'm not sure how/if conversational modeling in Seam is applicable to a multi-player game.  Not sure if workflow applies b/c you have multiple workers working simultaneously on the same task which is not how BPM works AFAIK (usually it's resource A finishes task 1 --> resource B finishes task 2 --> etc. in BPM modeling).

          • 2. Re: Off-topic design question
            pgmjsd

            I solved that problem using a POJO JMS listener that delegates messages to a bunch of SFSBs.   Each SFSB represents the state of a 'game', and each 'player' interacts with the SFSB for their game via JMS.  The POJO JMS listener picks up the messages and looks up a SFSB in a map (think of each SFSB as a 'game'), and invokes a method on the SFSB.   The SFSB returns information about the next state, which is then broadcast on a topic.   A conversation-scoped bean is used to subscribe to that topic and relay the changes back to the browser via Seam remoting.



            In my case, the 'players' are traders, and the 'games' are option contracts.

            • 3. Re: Off-topic design question
              earnest.dyke

              Excellent solution Joshua! I will look into this.


              Earnie!

              • 4. Re: Off-topic design question
                jguglielmin

                If you don't want to have to configure JMS and have the time, check out ICEfaces.  It has the ability to server-push (ajax-push or COMET).  You could simply have an application-scoped GameManager that would push the updated game info to each user that is registered in the game group.  The new SessionRenderer API is quite easy to implement.  For each SFSB, you would add the user to the (gameID) group (one line of code).  Any method in this bean that changes the state of the game could then trigger an event that the GameManager would observe and push the updated state to the rest of the game group.  It wouldn't be too difficult to have more than one game group either.  For a user to exit the group, you just remove them from the group (again, just one line of code).

                • 5. Re: Off-topic design question
                  pgmjsd

                  Yes, but that's basically rolling your own pub-sub (not that it's that hard).  Also, it would be difficult to make that work in a cluster.


                  The neat thing about using JMS for communicating to and from the 'game state' is that you can have anything trigger changes to the game.   EJB3 timers might be good in a real time strategy game, for example.

                  • 6. Re: Off-topic design question
                    jguglielmin

                    Actually, ICEfaces has a version of server-push for clustering, the BroadcastRenderer.  It just does the configuring of JMS for you.  (you can look at the code to see).  You can still use ejb3 timers or trigger pushes from a database as well.