I'm trying to develop my first ever browser-based multiplayer game that utilizes my own websocket server which has no multi-threading capability.
It will be a game where players try to be the fastest in solving as many puzzles as possible in a particular amount of time. Whoever solves a puzzle first wins that round and the next puzzle is served, until time has expired. The player who solved the most puzzles first wins the game.
To keep the CPU-load of the server as low as possible, I'm trying to come up with a strategy that signals clients when time has expired. You see, while games are ongoing I'm simply waiting for input from clients with socket select and a reasonable select timeout. This works nicely to keep the CPU load down. But, as my server has no multi-threading capability, I'm trying to prevent my server from monitoring ongoing games in a busy while loop (continually interrupting socket select), merely to monitor if time has expired.
So, I thought about simply waiting for client input and only then signal the client that time has expired. And if per chance no player is responding anymore (they all disconnected, left game, etc.), I simply mark the game as finished if the game state is requested at some later time.
Do you see any problems with this strategy? And, can you suggest other strategies that I may have overlooked, that don't rely on a busy while loop?
Just after posting the question I realized that I haven't thought things through enough, because I'm faced with the same conundrum of signalling the start of the game as well, of course, which actually is much more time critical. :-(
Actually, after given it a bit more thought still, I think I can signal the start of the game to all clients as soon as the last player has entered the game. So that may not actually be all that problematic after all.
