Matchmaker
From TedTycoon.co.uk
Matchmaker is my own Populous online lobby which players can use to organise and start games on. It was created in late 2007 in VB.NET. It was the third networking application I had made after Poker and the MP Sender. I wrote it alongside the Populous Matchmaker Service which is a PHP web application used for account creation / management, game reviews, league tables and clan management.
The matchmaker works as a client and server which are two separate applications. The server application is left running on a sever machine which listens for clients on a certain port. The players then download and use the client application which connects to the server application and acts as a chatroom.
Games / Modification
When creating games the matchmaker provided the host with all the settings that you would set when Populous is launched, it also allows additional options such as playing new levels, swapping player positions on the map based on alliances and generating random maps by calling the Random Map Generator library. The matchmaker uses the Map Viewer Control to preview the map in pre-game lobbies.
The matchmaker then does the appropriate file swaps / edits and then launches the game in multiplayer mode. It then changes the memory to change the in-game settings to be the same as the ones set in the matchmaker pre-game lobby.
Website
When writing the matchmaker I also create a online website which connected to the database where players and games were stored. The matchmaker server queries the site to authorise logging in and to record games. As I had little knowledge of PHP, I taught myself the language as I made the web application using various PHP help sites. I also did the same with MySQL which was the database software that was used.
See Also
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