Digging through my gamemaker folder, I came across Aeon Online again and thought I'd put up a Beta testing server. Question time.
- If I were hosting a game maker server on a computer, which operating system would you suggest to use? Do any of the Windows operating systems have an advantage over the other? Speed and efficiency in mind. The server is built with GM8 and was always on a Windows XP computer when tested in the past. I have a Windows 7 Ultimate and XP disk and plan on reformatting a computer and running it with a fresh slate. Any preference? - I have a question towards you Online Game Dev's that have dealt with GM. What was your experience like? Were there certain obstacles that you had to overcome? I'd like to talk to more of the online GM programmers. There's alot of online GM games being made these days. It would be interesting to see how they like it. Only a handful of them actually existed after a year of their public debut. It's definitely a challenge, but I'm wondering if it's just the cost and maintenance that drives them away from the project. I personally think adding the new content and managing the users is the easy part. What drives me away from projects for periods of time is usually time and money.So, yea. tl;dr GM Online Game. Best operating system to run it on? What should I watch out for? If you make online games, I wanna be buddies. :)
Many many years ago I made an online GM game. Well actually I didn't mess with the online code, I dealt with game logic while -0NL1N3- wrote the server and all that jazz (I haven't heard from him in years though, idk if he's still active or doing GM at all). If I recall correctly he went on to make a pretty easy to implement online engine that you could take a look at, albeit for an earlier GM version.
I'm not too worried about the online engine. That's been coded already. I based it off of Blaxun's engine using 39dll. My server is going to be on a machine with a Dual Core 1.8ghz CPU and 2gb of RAM. It's a pretty lousy machine, but it's a spare PC that I have and will have to due for now. I'm wondering what things I should do to make sure it doesn't lag TOO much. I'm pretty sure it'll be okay for a few players. But I know some of the more popular GM Online games noticed lag with dozens of players online.
If you really wanted performance out of your server, look into C++ sockets. A GM game doesn't necessarily have to communicate with another GM executable in order to send and receive messages online. This is why a server and game have two separate builds.
If I don't know how to code in C++, would it be difficult to learn what I need to convert a GM made server to it? I've read numerous times that GM Game Dev's have converted to C++ servers for efficiency, but it sounds complicated. Probably well worth it though.
It's not that complicated, There may be someone you could ask.
Really one of the reasons you should do it in C++ is because the GM DLL's can't handle expansion.