Programming

Hi,
Basically I've written a game in ncurses that supports multiple players. Each player has a process associated with him which shares a segment of memory in which the player's structures are stored, and these structured are accessed by the 'server' program and handled there. The scope of the program is that when a user wants to access a game that has already started he can do so from his terminal, and the 'server' process will simply fork a child process to handle his input and start communicating with it. I am having problems implementing this. Is there a way to have the server listen for commands that can come from a seperate terminal such that when this command is invoked it performs a specific routine ? Thanks. Any help will be appreciated.

This is mostly a networking problem. How familiar are you with TCP networking? You could also do this through UNIX domain sockets but you could just as easily substitute TCP sockets and get a game server that can work over the internet.

The jist of it is, have a thread in your server waiting for connections such that, when accept() returns, the server forks off a new process to handle the new connection.

If you have shared memory, why does the server need to handle the input?

The client process writes and reads shared memory. What else is needed?

Correct me if I'm wrong but it sounds to me like the shared memory is all part of the server and not relevant to the clients. The server forks off its own processes to handle the game space.

[edit] Yeah, I was wrong. Let me rethink this.

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Okay, so the clients are already sharing memory.

1) How are you mutexing this? Are you mutexing this?
2) Lots and lots of ways to handle server-client communication, but shoehorning that into the shared mem would just be building your own ad-hoc sockets. Might as well use real sockets.

Hey guys thanks for your interest. The server program initializes game character structures and stores them in shared memory. The client side process listens for user input and modifies the game character structures accordingly. On changes to the character structures the server does some graphical handling to indicate these changes to the user. What I need is a means for the client side program to connect to a server side program which is already running in order for the server side program to run a method that initializes a character structure in shared memory and spawns off a user process to listen for input from the terminal that the user 'connected' from.

---------- Post updated at 01:35 PM ---------- Previous update was at 01:34 PM ----------

btw..all users that could possibly connect to the game are gonna be running on the same machine but different terminals...just in case you find it relevant

What do you mean by 'terminal'? Do you mean that literally -- the server has to take over the client's terminal device? Or do you just mean the server has to listen for input from the client process?

How are you mutexing the shared memory? Are you mutexing the shared memory?

Lots and lots of ways to handle server-client communication, but shoehorning that into the shared mem would just be building your own ad-hoc sockets. Might as well use real sockets.

the clients terminal device must cause the 'server' process to register it within the server process and initialize a shared memory segment. I don't see the need for mutexing as the shared memory segment is being modified by only one process and read by only process also. Hence no corrupt data can occur. I was hoping to implement this without the use of sockets.