My Passion
MMORPG Server & Client
After completing the Game maker course in Term 1, I have never really been able to completely ditch Game maker. I really love how simple it is, and yet it is also incredibly powerful. I have always had an interest in MMORPG's, even when i was younger, i tried out World of Warcraft and found it pretty fun. Because of this, I decided to try program my own from scratch.
The idea of programming your own MMORPG Server & Client from scratch sounds easy, but I soon found it is actually quite complicated. Programming for a server makes you think in a whole dimension to programming for simple, single player games. For example; In a Single-player, 2D RPG, all you have to worry about is the game-play for that one player. Whereas with an MMO, you have to worry about synchronizing players whilst sending and receiving information from the server.
Game Maker on it's own has limited multiplayer functionality, but i discovered that a guy who goes by the name of "39ster" made an extremely helpful DLL called the "39dll". Because Game maker has the ability to call external programs, I was able to program certain functions in Game maker and then call them via the dll. 
As i began to make the basic systems of an MMORPG, I realised that i was getting into something much more complicated than i have attempted before. Scripts that i could make in under 3 lines for single player games became 60+ line scripts. Not to mention the fact that I was used to working in 1 .gmk file, wheras with an MMORPG I needed 2, a Server.gmk and a Client.gmk. This soon made things more interesting, especially when i got the basic movement down and began to save character stats on the server machine in .ini files. Here's a preview of my "Register" case code:
What I'm hoping to achieve is something like this:
