Android Multiplayer Game with Socket Programming

Question

I have been searching if it is possible to develop a multiplayer game with socket programming on android platform over WiFi but I couldn't come across with a certain answer.

As I found out, there are ServerSocket and Socket classes in android sdk.

Can I use those to establish communication between 2 devices, over WiFi?

Also if I can make 2 devices connected somehow, how should I combine this with my game architecture?

Any advice will greatly appreciated. This is my first try on Android and Socket Programming. I heard about Skiller, WiFi Direct and some other stuffs but It has to be done with Sockets.

Answer 1

I am actually from Skiller and I will try to address at least some of your points:

• Why do you need sockets for your game? It will help a lot if you will explain what exactly you are trying to achieve. Maybe there are other, less complicated, ways you can achieve the same thing. And integrating the communication solution with your game logic relies directly on that.

• Directly connecting two devices, whether they are connected using wifi or 3G is a very complicated task. In order to do so you need to know the IPs of the devices and it varies from difficult (wifi - depends on the wifi you are connecting to) to almost impossible (3g - you can not see the ip of the device behind operators proxy) unless you implement couple different techniques or use intermediate servers to do that job. These solutions of course will cost you because of a hardware resources and the most important time resource. From my experience in that field I strongly recommend to use existing solutions if it matches your needs (and I am really trying to be objective ;))

Hope it helps to further investigate what you need for your game. If you want to check out Skiller SDK you are more than welcome to do that in our wiki: http://wiki.skiller-games.com/ or send an email to [email protected]

Michael