Blog Week 8 (Spring Break)

Spring break gave me a lot of time to develop familiarity with UDP socket programing. I was able to successfully communicate a hello world message from the game to a server application running on my computer. Along with the ability to send basic messages I was also able to save the address of the client that sent the message meaning I can tell the difference between a new client and an old one. This distinction will be very important when setting up the game. A new client has no knowledge of the state of the track so the server has to know when its receiving a new connection so that it can broadcast all of the track data to the client, essentially catching up to the rest of the users. The biggest concern that I have at this point is the possibility for data loss in this initialization portion. It is essential that the new client gets all the right track info because this is the only time its getting the full picture. After the initialization phase the only messages sent should be updates. In the next week I will continue developing the server client code and send some basic updates about the track to see if this method of communication will be fruitful or if I should pivot while I still can.