Computer Beginner Guide

There are several attractions to using the Internet to play games. The Internet can make games available to large numbers of users on a round-the-clock basis. The Internet can provide users with the opportunity to build global support communities for particular games and allow direct marketing of game-related items to consumers. It is harder to add Internet capability to a game after it is written than during the design phase. There are several networking issues that must be taken into a count when a multiplayer game is being designed. Session-Oriented Multiplayer Games Not every multiplayer game is amenable to delivery on the Internet. In many ways, turn-based games are easier to deploy than fighting games because of inherent latency problems with Internet communications. Even for turnbased games, designers need to decide whether new players can drop in at any time or whether they can join only at fixed points in the game. In session-oriented multiplayer games, new playe...

Online games can be delivered via the Internet or through dedicated game servers on wide area networks with locally installed client software on a player’s personal computer. Single-player games are often accessed directly from a Web site and a player communicates with a game from inside his or her Web browser. Game play for single-user games using a Web browser interface is much like game play for single-user games designed for stand-alone PCs, because the game logic may in fact be running on the local PC and not on the server. To display multimedia content, a user is usually required to have the appropriate media plug-ins installed on his or her personal computer. Standard Web technologies (HTML, Javascript, common gateway interface scripts, or Java) might be used to deliver the game output to the Web browser and to process the player’s input. To communicate with a dedicated game server, the client program may be implemented using any programming language capable of sup...

Using any Internet search engine and typing in the search string “computer games,” one is likely to find several million hits. Some sites may simply allow visitors to download games to be installed on their personal computers. Some of these games may be freeware, given away by developers, or they may be shareware, in which developers trust users to send voluntary donations to offset development costs. These games may be free demonstration versions of games that can purchased either online or in local retail stores. Some of these sites also provide support resources for both game players and game developers. Some of these sites may provide visitors with opportunities to play games online without needing to install them on their own personal computers. Many companies make Web-based user support resources available to registered owners of their products. Game companies are no exception. Online registration of products is an option commonly included during the installation of ...

Programming computers to play games attracted the interest of such computer scientists as Babbage, Turing, and Shannon long before the first personal computers (PCs) came into existence. When personal computers and dedicated game consoles became widely available, in the 1970s, large numbers of computer game titles appeared in the marketplace almost immediately. Some people have argued that the computational expectations of modern computer game players pushed PC hardware manufacturers to increase the multimedia processing power of the home computer. The advent of the Internet and its rapid spread to homes throughout the world similarly has attracted the attention of game designers seeking to create multiplayer games among widely dispersed users. Creating games intended to run on the World Wide Web requires a good understanding of the principles used to design games for stand-alone computers, as well as knowledge about network architecture and client/server computing. The ...

Developing computer opponents for turn-based games was one of the earliest applications of artificial intelligence (AI) by computer scientists. Many of these early computer opponents make use of a static evaluation function that takes a proposed game state as input and returns a numeric value indicating the value of the position of the state. By applying the static evaluation function to each new game state that is reachable from the current game state, the computer opponent can select the alternative with the best numeric value. The performance of computer opponents can be improved by looking ahead two or more moves before applying the static evaluation function. An algorithm like minimax is used to combine the results of the “look ahead” moves (recognizing the fact that each player will be looking for the best move possible). Another task confronting opponents in combat or sports games is path finding through the game objects displayed on the screen. Nothing exposes wea...

Not every game lends itself easily to online play. Multiplayer games in which players take turns moving and single-player games in which players complete against a computer opponent possessing artificial intelligence seem to be the easiest to adapt to Internet play. One reason for choosing to play a game on the Internet is to experience the interaction with game players around the world. The key to developing a good game is to give players interesting challenges to overcome. The solutions to these challenges should be intuitive to the players and should gradually increase in difficulty. This allows a game to be learned as the player’s skill increases. A game that produces random results for a given input may not be perceived as an entertaining game. Genre. The term genre, as used in this chapter, describes a game type. There are many types of computer games. Use of the term genre is a bit controversial among game designers. Some game designers do not believe it is possib...