I'm doing a 1.5h talk at a conference next week about CrowdGaming, construct2 and nodejs. So I figured I'd go back to the roots of gaming and implemented a MassiveCrowdGaming (MCG) version of Pong! Hopefully there will be enough people in the crowd with a mobile phone ready so that we have a huge pong battle going, simple but fun

I just found a bug in the "Send heartbeat", "On Heartbeat" part of the crowdgaming plugin. I'll upload a new version, 5.1 this version will also include a new feature called "Storage property". This is like a global storage that is "Shared" between all connections. If one connection or the main game change a storage property it will be pushed out to all the other connections.

There are three parts to the "Storage property" feature:

The Action: "Set storage property",

The Expression: CrowdGaming.GetStorageProperty("CurrentMission")

The Event On storage property changed

justifun ximo Amadeus russpuppy rocky53204 nonom oldandgrey — socialpilgrim miketolsa stefanos

Has anyone had a chance to try out the 4.4.1 release? rocky53204 had problems getting past the "Connecting" screen when starting it up, but I cannot re-create that problem. Is anyone else experiencing any problems?

New release 4.4.1!

• Added a simple drawing "game"
• minor bugfixes
• Action1 through 4 are now string only, make sure you update your event sheets and change Action1 = 2 to Action1 = str(2) or Action1 = "2"

justifun I've shared the 4.4 release with you. I have change some names of actions, due to spelling mistakes. This could cause a lot of problems for you if you use an old capx, with this new crowdgaming plugin. I had to rename my capx to zip, then open the archive and rename the action/conditions/expressions that had changed. Basically you start your capx, see which error C2 throws at you and then to correct these in the mgbase.xml located in the crowdgaming.capx zip archive.

Let me know if anyone want help you clean up your capx? I don't want you to go nuts and stop using the CrowdGaming plugin since you've invested time in it.

I will share the 4.4 release everyone else soon, wait for the email.

justifun I had tangled myself into a substring mess, I've cleaned it up now, thanks for spotting it!

function getSendToObject(str) {

var pieces = str.split('|'), to = pieces.splice(0, 2)[1], msg = pieces.join("|");

return {to: to, msg: msg};

}

I'll try to update the latest beta package, or if I can't do that I'll upload a new one and notify everyone.

justifun PoisonDarts, sounds like fun!

That is most likely a bug in my getSendToObject method which does some parsing. I'll have a look at it.

— Great!! That's awesome! I'll check this out tomorrow! Thanks for sharing!

justifun I would love to see it! I'm too tired right now though. Not that many hours before my kids will wake me up, I will try to turn on skype once in awhile to see if you're there

Amadeus The server doesn't know much about the game, it's basically the main game that has all the info, plus we only send actions and preferably only delta actions (when anything changes), . So if we want a controller to act/show the main game screen we would have to the that info from the main game. Only the main game know the exact state of the game.

I would suggest that we use the System Save to send the entire state of the main game, and then use load from json in the controller to draw the state of the main game.

You could do this with the CrowdGaming plugin as it is today, but it will require some well placed events. Or we could make this into a plugin feature. So that the main game could use an action like "Update Main Game State" which would take a string (the saveStateJson), and when this is sent to the server it will broadcast it to every controller that has activated the ListenForMainGameChanges. In the controller a On Main Game State Changed condition would be triggered with a Main Game State Json, that can be use to load the game.

Your thoughts?

justifun I'm not sure if I ever got the bat file to work or not, but you will have to do an export and then run the exe-file to test the "Run file" action. But you probably already tried that since you were able to run exe-files.

I did some research about nwjs and learned that it doesn't use any web server (which I originally thought) but instead it reads directly from disk. The export produces a file called package.nw if you rename this to package.zip and look in the zip-archive you find all your files there. However these files only work when run in the nodewebkit environment, which means I can't just "server" these file from a web server because there would be dependency errors.

So why do we need a web server? Well we need the "controllers" to be able to connect to something. What I have done to make this work is:

• add server.js as a project file
• modified the nwjs plugin and added a start web server action
• In the Start event sheet I've added Start Web Server and Run "node server.js"
• Export with Nwjs exporter
• Open package.nw (rename to zip and open)
• Export with html5 exported
• Create a directory called "controller" and add html5 export to it
• Add the "controller" directory to the package.zip file
• rename package.zip to package.nw
• run the exe

When you run the exe it will start a web server that will "serve" the html5 export on port 50000, so when you connect to ip-of-host-machine:50000 you will see the controller, as you normally would. The main game also starts the server.js file so the main game an controllers can connect to one another.

This is a step in the right direction towards being able to package CrowdGaming games to the masses. The problem with showing the ip-that the "controllers" should connect to still remains.

new release - beta 4.3, with minor updates:

• Added camera object and removed scroll to on gamers.
• Added event sheet for camera to zoom out and in depending on where the gamers are
• Server - reinitialize game, when main game is restarted all the connections will reappear in the game. This will be useful for when moving from one game to another and keeping the gamers. Or when having time based games (matches) that restart. More to come on this.

make sure to "update" the plugin and that you run the new server.js file.

Check it out!