GoTacToe

Tic-Tac-Toe with a server, March 9th, 2023

localhost demo

linux-windows demo

(pending)

Details

The good old, tic-tac-toe but there's a catch, I wanted to learn which was the easiest way to create an "online" game.

Accessing someone else's computer

Since I wanted to keep things simple, I figured it was better to make one of the clients act as the server and be in charge of data synchronization. The first hurdle was the direct communication to the client/server socket over the internet, other than opening and forwarding ports in your router, I couldn't find a simple solution to this, and to be honest, didn't sound so fun. I was also looking into applications such as ngrok and localtunnel, I tried to learn how to replicate them but I couldn't figure it out. I also thought that allowing a player to manipulate the board freely (cheating) didn't sound too realistic.

After some time I decided to create another program that will run independently, this program will listen to a pair of connections to set up a session for them to play.

Server performance

Given that my server isn't powerful I needed to make sure the application wasn't taking too much CPU power. Games run in an endless loop, letting it run with free reign could mean that the tiny CPU would always be maxed out. I decided to cap it to 15 frames per second.

Links

Client

Server

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