Multi-Player games notes

It is NOT well organized and NO game is made yet.

I just wanna keep a note about my thoughts about a pipeline for creating a multiplayer game. It is not specific to a single game but more a frame work or work flow. I hate reinventing the wheel so I prefer choosing existing tools.

I focus on the pure game itself so far. The external elements, such as log in UI or database, are not discussed here. I wanna describe my demands with keywords. Working along, low budget or no budget, indie, multi-player, real-time,  and cross-platforms.

I would like to have these steps: graphic modeling, logic, and network.

I am using blender and 3ds max for modeling. I used blender at the beginning. It is free, and incredible powerful. It is perfect for all my modeling tasks. When I found out I can get 3ds max and all the related Autodesk software for free as a student, I gave it a try as it is a kind of industry standard and a lot of models online are in max format. And, it should be better somewhere and have better compatibility with other software as it is sold thousands of dollars. However I found out, so far, it is a little better. I still need some work to import max models into unity 3d. On current stage, I would stay on blender for a while, because I am more familiar with it now. Probably I will move to 3ds max.

There are also plenty of game engines, such as blender, unity 3d, unreal,cocos-2dx, and panda 3d. I am using all of those above. unity 3d and unreal is the best in terms of performance, cross-platforms and network support.If you just need a offline game, they are the best to go. blender is good for tiny prototypes on pc. It is still powerful and easy to use, at least to myself. However, I have never seen any serious games out of it, except some demos. For cocos-2dx or panda 3d, there is no GUI, generally speaking. You need to implement your world from sketch.

Networking is kind of new to gaming, as I have not find any game engine has network embedded for dummy users. In other words, you need to program anyway if you need online games. I am not sure if unity or unreal handles server-client either. As on the server side, you probably do not need any rendering but just logic.

To conclude so far. Offline games, go unity 3D or unreal. Online games, any one is ok, and implement your own server.