Networking¶
Description¶
The Networking class is responsible for sending and reading peer-to-peer (P2P) packets in a multiplayer game. Packets are sent to a user in the same lobby, specified with that user’s GalaxyID (receiverID).
In our demo, we have implemented two types of P2P packets with different content: switchPacket (represented by the switchPacketBuffer variable), which contains the information about the result of the player’s turn, and ballPacket (represented by the ballPacketBuffer variable), which contains the positions of all pool balls in the game world.
Class Initialization and Termination¶
The Networking class is initialized when a online 2-player game begins.
This class initializes variables of a byte array type, which store P2P packets (switchPacketBuffer and ballPacketBuffer). In order to retrieve the positions of balls and then send them in packets, an array with all of the ball objects from the GameManager class is assigned to private GameObject[] balls inside the OnEnable() method.
Definitions of Listeners¶
This class initializes only one listener — NetworkingListener() — which receives callbacks when a P2P packet is available.
NetworkingListener¶
The purpose of NetworkingListener() is to listen for the events related to packets that come to the client. We use this listener in the demo because it only has 2-player lobbies in which the players can communicate directly. If the goal is to send packets to the entire lobby, and not to a particular user, you should consider using ServerNetworkingListener() instead.
The OnP2PPacketAvailable() method checks if a new packet is received. Inside this method, we peek the packet (if it is available) using the GOG GALAXY SDK PeekP2PPacket() method, and assign it to the packetReceived variable in order to read it and translate from a byte array to an array.
We use two channels to send and receive packets, so we can easily differentiate between packets containing ball positions from the ones with information that a player’s turn was finished. To check this, we use the switch statement to distinguish packets from the two channels and to use a proper reading method for the received packet.