Phaser Quest is a reproduction of Mozilla's Browserquest using the following tools:
- The Phaser framework for the client
- Socket.io and Node.js for the server and client-server communication
The game canvas and the game states are created in js/client/main.js. The Home state is started first, and will display the home page
of the game. The Game state is started upon calling startGame() from the Home state.
js/client/game.js contains the Game object, which corresponds to the Game state and contains the bulk of the client code.
Game.init() is automatically called first by Phaser, to initialize a few variables. Game.preload() is then called, to load the
assets that haven't been loaded in the Home state. When all assets are loaded, Phaser calls Game.create() where the basics of the game
are set up. At the end of Game.create(), a call is made to Client.requestData() (from js/client/client.js) to request initialization
data from the server. Upon reception of this data, Game.initWorld() is called, which finishes starting the game. The main update loop of the client is Game.update().
server.js is the Node.js server that supports the game. Most of the server-side game logic however is located in js/server/GameServer.js. Every 200ms, GameServer.updatePlayers() is called, and sends updates to all clients (if there are updates to send, as determined by the curstom interest management system). Client-side, these updates are processed by Game.updateWorld() and Game.updateSelf().
The code used for the custom binary protocol for the exchange of update packets can be found in js/client/Decoder.js, js/server/Encoder.js and js/CODec.js.
For the client, everything is included in the code (phaser.js, easystar.min.js, ...). You will need npm to install the Node.js packages required for the server. To run the server, you'll need to have Node.js installed, as well as MongoDB.
Clone the repository. Inside the newly created directory, run npm install to install the Node.js packages listed in package.json. Then run node server.js to start the server.
By default, it'll listen to connections on port 8081; you can change that behaviour by using the -p flag (e.g. node server.js -p 80).
By default, it'll attempt to connect to MongoDB on port 27017; you can change that behaviour by using the --mongoPort flag (e.g. node server.js --mongoPort 25000).
I have written and will keep writing articles about some development aspects of the game. The full list of existing articles is available here.
Here is the detail of the topics covered so far:
- Clients synchronization
- Latency estimation
- Interest management (the "AOI" stuff you might encounter in the code)