Welcome to The Essential Guide to Creating Multiplayer Games with Godot 4.0. In this hands-on book, you are going to learn the core concepts used to create online multiplayer games using the Godot Engine 4.0 Network API.
Firstly, we are going to understand some fundamental aspects of how computers communicate through a network and the main protocols, including which ones are more relevant for making online multiplayer games.
After that, we will understand how Godot Engine 4.0 uses and provides both low- and high-level implementations for networking using its network API. We’ll understand some core classes that we can use to pass data around to multiple computers on the same network. And then we’ll focus on the high-level API known as ENetMultiplayerPeer.
With the fundamentals in place, we’ll use the knowledge we just learned to turn local gameplay features into online gameplay features. To do that, we will develop five game projects:
- An online quiz game
- Checkers
- Pong
- A co-op platformer
- A top-down adventure
Then, we’ll learn some techniques we can use to improve our players’ experience by optimizing how their game sends, receives, and processes network data. We’ll understand that we don’t need constant updates and that we can do most of the gameplay with small bits of data and let the clients’ computers fill the gaps on their own.
Throughout each chapter, you’re going to do a role play of a network engineer working for a fictional, independent game development studio. In each chapter, you will apply your recently learned knowledge to a fictional problem presented by your studio’s peers. You’ll focus on the network aspect of each project they present, so you don’t waste your precious time trying to understand unnecessary aspects.
In this chapter, you are going to learn the most important aspect of establishing a network of computers: to connect them all together. You’ll see how this process happens, the reason for doing this, what’s required to establish this connection, and how we can do that using the API that Godot Engine provides.
We will cover the following topics in this chapter:
- Introduction to a network
- Understanding the Godot Engine Network API
- Setting up the client side
- Setting up the server side
- Making your first handshake
By the end of the chapter, you’ll have a client and server version of an application that establishes the connection of two or more computers. This is the very core of everything that we are going to see throughout the book, and with that knowledge, you’ll understand how you can start making computers communicate within a network, which is exactly what you need to do in online multiplayer games.
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