GMnet - Manual

1. Basic configuration

In this tutorial we want to make a simple platformer with some neat little extras to demonstrate what GMnet ENGINE can do. Our platformer will have:

Walls/Players/Physics (obviously)
Multiple rooms
An overlay that shows connected players
A night and day cycle
A basic chat system

Adding the engine to a project

Before we can get started, add the asset to an empty project. Depending on what you want to do, you have three options.

If you want to follow this tutorial yourself, you should add ALL scripts and sprites and the object obj_htme to your project.
If you want to just read through this tutorial and test the demo game, simply add everything.
When starting completely blank or when you want to add the engine to your own game, add all folders named htme and udphp but not the htme_demo folders.

Configuration

Great! No matter what option you chose, you propably want to take a look at the configuration, so let me walk you through.

The configuration can be found in scripts/htme/htme_init. The first things in this configurations are the enums that are used by the engine. Just ignore them and jump straight to CONFIGURATION.

The first thing you'll find under configuration is randomize();. That assures that the random operations Game Maker does are truly random, which is important for the engine.

After that you can set the debug level. Valid options can be found in the enum htme_debug and how debugging works is explained in the comment. Leave it on the default option for now.

Let's skip ahead to self.global_timeout. That's actually the only important configuration option and even that can stay on default if you want. Timeout specifies after how many steps of inactivity the connection between client and server will die and you will be disconnected. The default is 5*room_speed which basicly means 5 seconds. When client and server don't communicate to each other for 5 seconds, they are considered to be disconnected.

So yeah that was all there is to configure for now.

Follow the next steps of the configuration. They will explain how GMnet ENGINE (or GMnet PUNCH to be precise) enables you to connect to other players even behind a firewall.

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