Question Regarding Visual C++ 6.0

#1 Ted - by global search it means a search of all the files in the current project, you can find the edit menu under find & replace - there should be a find in files option (also accessible via the keyboard shortcut ctrl+shift+F).

#2 Thanks for helping me out of this delerium. Now to another question, thats also ought to be preety easy: when i have added a file to my project, how do i remove it? Did search on this to but alas the answer evaded me

#3 Oh and another minor issue which i dont dare to raise another thread for: In dreamers rpg tutorials, firstly, he forgets to include the clientCmdUpdate functions which are suposed to keep track of the players inventory throught the local db in the nmbr 5 file, but my question is this: now when i have created the local.db, it ends up in the same example folder as my server db, so what is the point of making a client specific db when it seems liks its really not client specific ? And what are the drawbacks of using server only db? I guess there must be some otherwise people would not use local and server db technqiues.

#4 To remove files from the project you should just be able to right click the file in viewer and select remove or delete... it's been a while since I've used Visual c++ 6.0 so appologies if that's not right.

You don't have to implement both client and server databases but there are advantages to do doing this - mainly to save on network traffic and server processing, remember although for your copy of the software the databases might end up in the same folder but when you distribute your end game you shouldn't be giving people all the server code and database... that runs on your server only (assuming you don't want people to be able to host their own servers too).

Consider the following for a user displaying their inventory and picking an item.

1. Client: User opens inventory
2. Client: Requests list of items in inventory from server
3. Server: Gets request, reads data from the database, sends to the client.
4. Client: Receives list of items from server.
5. Client: Display items and allow user to select item to use.
6. Client: Send msg to the server to say we want to use this item.
7. Server: Receive message, verify it's an allowed item (to stop hacking) and assign to player.

Now step 3 we have to code anyway because at some point we will need to send the items to the client, for example if they reinstall, or we want to synch the server and client - good practice and perhaps something to do when they login. But think how many times you open your inventory up to check on an item you've just picked up, how many health potions you have, how damaged your armour is, needing to drop an item when you're carrying too much, etc... now you could leave step 3 as is for all of these but the server will have to process it, and send the data over the network every time.

This isn't a problem if you're writing a single player game and perhaps not for small multiplayer games - 10-20 people but if you're creating a server that you want to get 100's or 1000's of people on then every bit of processing is precious..... and so you could cache this data on the client so they can just read the inventory from their local machine... no network traffic and no server processing.

The server still needs to do step 7 and check it's a valid item it was told to use so that a user couldn't hack their local inventory with some super weapon but you've saved your server some processing.

#5 Thanks for the input. Regarding the numbers of players, im nit all decided on that point. While i am certainly gonna keep my game multiplayer, i dont want is massivly, since massivly multiplayers game are, de facto, STUPID! Let me tell you why: there are thousands of players sucking up bandwith, making tha graphics be quite spartan and the combat systems toned down, now that would be okay, if you actualy interacted with those other players, like in eve and build great mega spacestations togheter, but in world of warcraft fer example, you just see other players, and dont do anything with them(no bullshit about guilds now please because u know as well as i that a guild on a server only interacts with a small portion of the players). The world pvp part sucks, coz there is not a good enough for reward for doing world pvp(which also sucks in wow but i wont go into details, but i have some rather strong arguments as to why) and 95% of the wow players play wow just to compensate their lack of status irl with mega death orcs in wow, which i find quite sad. Levling and gear is just a sidetrack for added flavor, it should never be thought of as a key feature, especialy when it affects gameplay. Ok now i had my rant about wow(i dont hate wow, i just dont think it such an great game everyone claims it to be), lets get to the point: Multiplayer game, where the players get to pick a faction( iwas thiking about 3). Dont want to many players togheter at a time, like 8 players for a party on a maybe client side hosted server or something like that, where they fight a non playable environment, except for when the factions fight each other over turf, where there might be as many as... 32 or 16 players at a time, doing something like a objective based deathmatch. Is there any know gameplay dymanics implented by a previous game to tackle this issue? If so please describe it or post a link or something.

DISCLAIMER: im not a dumbass, or maybe i am, only god are to judge, which makes me abit confused since i am ateisth.

#6 Well whether you're interested in creating an MMO type of game or not in my personal opinion it's never a bad thing to save on server resources, which gives you more to play with when working on AI, physics, etc. I would suggest for any game that you focus on getting a prototype up and running as quickly as possible with the main game play so you get a feel for that and the important stuff and then look if you need to implement client side data storage to help performance later in the project.

#7 Thats interesting. One of the thought i have been having i about skills n such, as seen in RPG games, is how do they do it? Do they create some kind of one-size-fits-all function that can process all instructions provided by the skill in some sort of dynamic way, or do they write on fucntion for each skill? Maybe its a tree of function with added properties depending on the skill? Or is it a mix of both? How much juice does a function spanning maybe... i dunno how many lines a skill function would contain but for the phoney skills i have coded so far its been about 50 lines or less(with hardcoded variables) really suck up on the server? And at which point is it too many skills? 30 per character?

Off topic: When i read my post, i closed one eye. Try it. Its really disturbing, feels like the screen floats out on you or something.