Taking a peek in the other end – the client

We have looked in the server extensively and have hopefully clarified all systems and learned how they come together to form a single object that services a lot of clients at once, and potentially even more aircraft! Now let's look at the other end, the client, and see how we took a jump from a single-player-only game into a fully-networked game.

Let's examine the MultiplayerGameState constructor first:

sf::IpAddress ip;
if (isHost)
{
    mGameServer.reset(new GameServer());
    ip = "127.0.0.1";
}
else
{
    ip = getAddressFromFile();
}
  
if (mSocket.connect(ip, ServerPort, sf::seconds(5.f)) ==   sf::TcpSocket::Done)
    mConnected = true;
else
    mFailedConnectionClock.restart();

mSocket.setBlocking(false);
...

We need to deduce which IP to communicate with, in order to successfully join a game. If we are the host, we just connect to the loopback address 127.0.0.1, otherwise, we need to connect to a pseudo-remote server. This means that in practice...