Are there any free multiplayer game servers available?

[Wampus]

Are there any free multiplayer game servers available?

I very much doubt I will find a free and reliable server for hosting games and I'm reluctant to try to run such a thing out of my house, but what about a simple listing service? Kind of like this:-

When someone hosts a game, the game is broadcast to a central server, which then lists the game as available. When the game is being played, the game is taken off the available game list. All the server does is try to link potential players with potentially available hosted games. It doesn't host games itself.

Is there something like the above?

[Moru]

Easy enough to create on your own on a free webhost. There is some highscore examples that can be remade into a simple list server in the samples directory or on the forums. Or on my homepage if/when it's working :-)

[kanonet]

Isnt \Samples\Network\InternetSessions what you look for?

[Wampus]

Easy enough to create on your own on a free webhost. There is some highscore examples that can be remade into a simple list server in the samples directory or on the forums. Or on my homepage if/when it's working :-)

Ah, yes, I guess that is a good approach. The bandwidth required shouldn't be too much, even if a game got quite popular, so a webserver could handle this sort of thing. I'm sure my webhost will be OK with this. It would also be nice to be able to see a webpage showing how many games were currently going on, perhaps even player rankings, etc. My PHP and MySQL skills aren't the best but they should suffice for this sort of thing.

Thanks Moru

Isnt \Samples\Network\InternetSessions what you look for?

Kanonet, yes, that should help.

[Crivens]

Apparently Game center has multiplayer capabilities built in. I asked Trucidare if he could incorporate the whole Game Center API set (highscores and achievements already exist) including multiplayer so hopefully he can produce the goods!

Cheers

[Wampus]

The recent addition of turn-based game support to the GameCenter API looked good. Real-time multiplayer games can be very slow over mobile phone networks so turn-based seems like a much safer bet.

The thing is though, if I (or you, or anyone) used a webserver to organise game announcements, scores, rankings, etc. there isn't so much need for GameCenter. If coordinating games between different phones like Androids and iPhones the webserver idea also makes more sense.

[Crivens]

Yeah but using game center is free and hopefully has more capacity and speed than probably what we can afford.

Cheers