for a personal project i started making a 2d game engine in C++ that uses sfml. The idea is having base "game object" classes from which a game will inherit.
Right now i have:
Game_engine class which has a run method that takes care of the game loop (fixed timestep loop). The loop consists in:
- dequeuing SFML window events
- step
- dequeue networking events
- call step function for each Object instance
- draw
- call draw update function for each Object instance
- call draw function for each Object instance
Resource_manager class which takes care about loading and holding resources and holding animations.
Animation and Animated_sprite, where animation exists only once per animation, has a pointer to the texture and a list of the frames, while animated sprite is a child of sf::Sprite and there's one instance per each instance of a game object. Animated sprite points to its animation and frames are updated when Object's draw_update is called.
Logger class, which queues up strings from the engine thread and uses a second thread to write the strings to file without the main thread suffering from write-to-disk delay
Networking_client class, which queues up networking packets in a secondary thread, and returns the queue to the Game_engine when it requires it for the networking part of the step.
Object class which is the basis on which an actual game's objects will be built. It has by default vertical and horizontal speed variables, and function to set them both as vertical and horizontal components or as speed and direction. It has both a sprite with its coordinates and its own coordinates. Sprite's coordinates are used by sfml to draw and will be updated with interpolation when draw_update is called. The own coordinates are updated when the step function is called, which in an actual game will take care of checking collisions and stuff like that.
Up until that point i really did everything kinda by instinct, but now i don't know how to design networking managed objects. Ideally i would have a server which runs the game without the drawing part, only the fixed steps, and holds information about all connected clients. My issues are not about lag compensation right now, but about how to deal with these classes.
When i shoot on my client, i would tell the server i shot, the server creates a projectile and its creation is sent to all clients together with an id that identifies the networking object for future updates (changes in direction, destruction). However this adds a delay in the client when it's shooting its own projectile. If i create the projectile in the client first and tell the server about its creation, the client can cheat about its coordinates. If i create the projectile individually in both, once the client receives the information "create projectile" from the server it can't tell it's its own already existing projectile and not someones else's. Same issue when a client is changing it's controlled object's direction...
Can i get help designing that? I did something like that in javascript (without lag compensation it was a teleporting fest) but idk i'm finding it harder to design now, because i'm making it more generic, while my javascript project was directly with the actual game objects.
Before anyone tells something like "use an existing engine", part of my interest is actual making my own, after all it's an hobby and i'll likely never publish any game with that, i just enjoy writing such things and overcomplicating my life in a way that ends in never having any concrete result whatsoever.
