Nowadays, online gaming has become a multi-billion-dollar industry, but in the past, it took a lot of time and manpower to develop an MMOG (massively multiplayer online game). This is because MMOG is a very complex system, and the development of a fastpaced online action game requires further technical considerations. After reading books and tutorials related to online game design, many readers are still unable to develop a multiplayer online game because the current books on the market are all focused on the technical discussion, but lack a complete and coherent example.
This book adopts a new way to explore this complex topic; that is, a working online game example is focused and comes with programming details to verify the theoretical discussion. The reason why it can be presented in this way is based on my work over a decade as both a professional game developer and a lecturer of multimedia and game development at several universities in Taiwan. Over the years, our team has accumulated experience and achievements in making online games, and obtained good results in related online game-design competitions. This book aims to share our experience with anyone interesting in making MMOGs.
If you have some experience in any programming language and want to know how to implement a massively multiplayer online game, this book is perfect for you. In the first part of this book, the essentials of the C# programming language, which is currently the main script language of the Unity game engine, is covered, followed by exploring the C# Object-Oriented Programming techniques required in the later chapters. After you become familiar with programming in C#, further examples are provided in the rest of this book to guide you to build and host an MMOG.
If you are an experienced Unity game developer who is interesting in MMOG development, this book is also useful. C# network and multithreaded programming are introduced in the second part to help the readers understanding the fundamentals in the network library, like the UNet or Mirror used in this book. Also, a dedicated chapter for mobile online game development covers the details of porting your MMOG to the largest gaming platform. Through the provided working examples, you'll not only understand the details in implementing an MMOG but also can apply the techniques presented in this book to the other networking libraries or game engines.
Visit the author's website at mmoprogramming.org to download the MMO working sample and the book's Table of Contents.
Dr. Chiu earned his Ph.D. in Interactive Game Engine Technology from National Chung Cheng University at Taiwan in 2015, and a Master of Computer Science degree in Computer Graphics from Arizona State University at Tempe in 1993. Before immigrating to Canada, he was the founder and CEO of the Powernet mobile business cooperation, which was a mobile-game content provider for the largest telecom company in Taiwan, Chunghwa Telecom. He has also taught game design and development classes for top-ranked universities, including the National Yunlin University of Science and Technology and Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology (STUST), where he help found the first graduate school in multimedia and entertainment science. While in STUST, his team created the online game Chaos Era, which won the Jury Award in the 2009 Chinese Gamer online game design competition.
