Planet PHP
Guest
"I'd like to make a multiplayer, economy-based game. Something like Stardew Valley, but with none of the befriending aspects and a player-based economy."
I started thinking about this the moment I decided to try and build a game using PHP and ReactJS. The trouble is that I knew nothing about the dynamics of multiplayer games, or how to think about and implement player-based economies.
I wasn't even sure that I knew enough about ReactJS to justify using it. I mean, the initial interface – where I focus heavily on the server and economic aspects of the game – is perfectly suited for ReactJS. But what about when I start to make the farming /interaction aspects? I love the idea of building an isometric interface around the economic system.
I once watched a talk, by dead_lugosi, where she described building a medieval game in PHP. Margaret inspired me, and that talk was one of the things that lead to me writing a book about JS game development. I became determined to write about my experience. Perhaps others could learn from my mistakes in this case, too.
The code for this part can be found at: github.com/assertchris-tutorials/sitepoint-making-games/tree/part-1. I've tested it with PHP 7.1 and in a recent version of Google Chrome.
Setting Up The Back-end
The first thing I searched for was guidance on building multiplayer economies. I found an excellent StackOverflow thread in which folks explained various things to think about. I got about half-way through it before realizing I may be starting from the wrong place.
"First things first; I need a PHP server. I'm going to have a bunch of ReactJS clients, so I want something capable of high-concurrency (perhaps even Web Sockets). And it needs to be persistent: things must happen even when players aren't around."
I went to work setting up an async PHP server – to handle high concurrency and support web sockets. I added my recent work with PHP preprocessors to make things cleaner, and made the first couple of endpoints:
$host = new Aerys\Host();
$host->expose("*", 8080);
$host->use($router = Aerys\router());
$host->use($root = Aerys\root(.."/public"));
$web = process .."/routes/web.pre";
$web($router);
$api = process .."/routes/api.pre";
$api($router);
This is from config.pre
I decided to use Aerys for the HTTP and Web Socket portions of the application. This code looked very different compared to the Aerys docs, but that's because I had a good idea about what I needed.
The usual process for running an Aerys app was to use a command like:
vendor/bin/aerys -d -c config.php
That's a lot of code to keep repeating, and didn't handle the fact that I wanted to use PHP preprocessing. I created a loader file:
return Pre\processAndRequire(__DIR__ . "/config.pre");
This is from loader.php
...and installed my dependencies:
"require": {
"amphp/aerys": "dev-amp_v2",
"amphp/loop": "dev-master",
"amphp/parallel": "dev-master",
"league/container": "^2.2",
"league/plates": "^3.3",
"pre/short-closures": "^0.3.0"
},
"require-dev": {
"phpunit/phpunit": "^6.0"
},
This is from composer.json
I wanted to use amphp/parallel, to move blocking code out of the async server, but it wouldn't install with a stable tag of amphp/aerys. That's why I went with the dev-amp_v2 branch.
Continue reading %Game Development with ReactJS and PHP: How Compatible Are They?%
Читать дальше...
I started thinking about this the moment I decided to try and build a game using PHP and ReactJS. The trouble is that I knew nothing about the dynamics of multiplayer games, or how to think about and implement player-based economies.
I wasn't even sure that I knew enough about ReactJS to justify using it. I mean, the initial interface – where I focus heavily on the server and economic aspects of the game – is perfectly suited for ReactJS. But what about when I start to make the farming /interaction aspects? I love the idea of building an isometric interface around the economic system.
I once watched a talk, by dead_lugosi, where she described building a medieval game in PHP. Margaret inspired me, and that talk was one of the things that lead to me writing a book about JS game development. I became determined to write about my experience. Perhaps others could learn from my mistakes in this case, too.
The code for this part can be found at: github.com/assertchris-tutorials/sitepoint-making-games/tree/part-1. I've tested it with PHP 7.1 and in a recent version of Google Chrome.
The first thing I searched for was guidance on building multiplayer economies. I found an excellent StackOverflow thread in which folks explained various things to think about. I got about half-way through it before realizing I may be starting from the wrong place.
"First things first; I need a PHP server. I'm going to have a bunch of ReactJS clients, so I want something capable of high-concurrency (perhaps even Web Sockets). And it needs to be persistent: things must happen even when players aren't around."
I went to work setting up an async PHP server – to handle high concurrency and support web sockets. I added my recent work with PHP preprocessors to make things cleaner, and made the first couple of endpoints:
$host = new Aerys\Host();
$host->expose("*", 8080);
$host->use($router = Aerys\router());
$host->use($root = Aerys\root(.."/public"));
$web = process .."/routes/web.pre";
$web($router);
$api = process .."/routes/api.pre";
$api($router);
This is from config.pre
I decided to use Aerys for the HTTP and Web Socket portions of the application. This code looked very different compared to the Aerys docs, but that's because I had a good idea about what I needed.
The usual process for running an Aerys app was to use a command like:
vendor/bin/aerys -d -c config.php
That's a lot of code to keep repeating, and didn't handle the fact that I wanted to use PHP preprocessing. I created a loader file:
return Pre\processAndRequire(__DIR__ . "/config.pre");
This is from loader.php
...and installed my dependencies:
"require": {
"amphp/aerys": "dev-amp_v2",
"amphp/loop": "dev-master",
"amphp/parallel": "dev-master",
"league/container": "^2.2",
"league/plates": "^3.3",
"pre/short-closures": "^0.3.0"
},
"require-dev": {
"phpunit/phpunit": "^6.0"
},
This is from composer.json
I wanted to use amphp/parallel, to move blocking code out of the async server, but it wouldn't install with a stable tag of amphp/aerys. That's why I went with the dev-amp_v2 branch.
Continue reading %Game Development with ReactJS and PHP: How Compatible Are They?%
Читать дальше...