Duc's Progress Report: 4/23/01

Goals for the past week

Get message passing between client and server working and build a lobby prototype.

Accomplishments for the past week

I scratched my initial development of the networking module, and instead decided to build on top of the SimpleClient/SimpleServer sample that comes with DirectPlay. As it turns this is much easy than building my own module from scratch. For the new networking module I was able to implement the message passage fairly easily. I then continued to clean up the code since it contained things we did not need for our purposes. Then, I separated the client and server application from the actual networking module. That way integration with other code will be much easier. The SimpleClient/SimpleServer sample already had a working implementation of the lobby. The lobby itself is a simple set of dialog boxes that allows the user to start the server, and clients to log in and join a certain session. This lobby is good enough for our purposes, so I retain that functionality from the sampele.

List of schedule-altering events

none

Plans for the coming week

The networking module as of now as only been confirmed to work correctly for one client. I need to create a global list to keep track of multiple clients. Also, I have to create a global message queue that the main application can access to pick up incoming messages received by the networking module. All this has to be unit tested, and the integrated with the rest of the game.