Dwarf Wars

This will be a Dwarf fortress / Rimworld enspired Multiplayer game. I am hoping to make it have the same sandbox story driven feel as it's inspiration but with friends. or strangers, however you want to play.

Game Scope

I want to have the world depth of Dwarf Fortress with it's 3D words and massive simulation but I want the actual game play and mechanics of how the world interacts with itself to be more simple like in Rimworld. I don't really want to spend the next 20 year coding the game up to be on par with the depth of Dwarf Fortress.

There should be two main components to the game.

• Client
• Server

Backend

The backend is written in go and will relay on Sqlite3 files to store information. I want this project to be easy to spin up on anyone's system. This is supposed to be a self host game. I am not sure if there are any better technologies out there that would allow for better saving of data then Sqlite3.

Need to figure out how to close a socket connection when the client sends a FIN packet to the server. the problem is looking like some clients will send a RESET connection request if they have data in their buffer or not.

The server will probably need to be broken up into multiple parts to not have the whole thing be quite so monolithic:

• Current
  • Connection / Auth Server
  • World Server
  • Game Server
  • Databases
    • SQL Server
    • Redis Server
• Potential In Future
  • Client / Lobby Server
    • Finding a server
    • Looking at stats
    • all none game related client actions
  • Broker Server
  • API Gateway
  • Connection Proxy / Server

From what I can find the difference is that the game server will handle the individual games while a world server will manage a cluster of game servers.

Going to have a connection server that will the the sole connection point and authentication point for users. the server will pool user traffic and batch it to the appropriate game server /world server

World Server vs Game Server

The world server is the manager of each match that is happening across any children game servers that it has while the game server purely calculates and manages the games that it is assigned. that is the best explanation I have for now.

Secrets Storage

I am currently looking into docker secrets for storing usernames, passwords, tokens. I know that you can use AWS Secrets manager but I don't want to pay for a cloud service when I can host something locally. I have plenty of computing power. there is no reason to buy more from amazon.

Encoding & Decoding

I Have chosen to go with Golang Gobs for this projects because the server and client are both planned to be in Go, I am not building a game that requires -1 latency. actually I am thinking of having the tick rate be half a second long so there will be plenty of time for network messages to be encoded and decoded. Gobs should make the process much easier and if they become a choke point in the future then I will just refactor the code as I don't think the network encoding / decoding will be super hard to swap out. all this should be doing anyways is encoding/decoding and the passing the data structure on to the next step.

Connections

Each Client should have 2 connecections to the game server. a TCP connection for managing the meta data and will be more of a management conneciton and a UDP connection that will handle all of the game data. I am still unsure about this as I think that if I just pushed the game data through a TCP connection it would be fine and much easier as I would just have to worry about processing the data not if it gets to me properly or not. that can be handed off to the NIC card and network drivers if we are using TCP.

Network buffers are an important topic to look into. this is kinda like youtube buffers but for games.

There will need to be a lot of predictive code for where the client is and where the server things everything should be. because this is Rimworld type game where the player will not have direct control over units this should be less touchy to implement...

Dispatching

I currently have the server setup to where all clients will interface with a default dispatcher at first and then when they request to join a game and they are accepted into that game they should be setup to send messages to the game instance rather then the Default dispatcher. I have not figured out how I will implement this yet But I am thinking that it will be a matter of swapping out the channel that the client object has to point to a game instance rather then the dispatcher.

Simulation Or Game

I need to figure out if I want this to be a game or a simulation because based on that decision I can start making the server and client that will aid in the process of making this. Currently I think I amtrying to make a game with the idea of a simulation.

Structure

• Server
• Clients Connect
  • Client Pool (Client Factory)
• Connected But not in game
  • Look at Games (Lobbies) going on and there stats
  • Look up other users
    • Stats
    • Current active worlds (lobbies) they are in
    • Send Friend Requests
    • Message Other Users
  • Look at the Events and notifications that are going on
• Game (Lobby)
  • Private Game
  • Public Game

Frontend

The Front end will be written in Go as well as the backend. This is to enable gobs as a serialization method. I was originally thinking that this could be a web based game but not if we are using gobs. I think it would be for the best to use a proper client anyways. Web games are not as popular as they used to be and if I am using go to procuess the front end is shouldn't be all that hard to make the client multiplatform anyways.