Mobile server implementations for tournament-style game? Access via REST services/wcf

I'm working on implementing a game server on AppHarbor for a tournament style game. I'm planning on using WCF and C#. I want the server to generate new "levels" every 5 minutes and send it out to all the clients that are online at the time. The clients would then after 3 minutes send back the results of the level (how the player did) and the server will analyze the results and send back the universal results to each client (leaderboards, statistics, etc). And this cycle would repeat.

I'm not sure where I should start. I was looking into making a WCF service application with REST services to get the information, but I don't know who to make the server do calculations and generations independent of the clients.

I would greatly appreciate any help that you all could give me.

Thank you.

2012-04-04 20:50
by tamaslnagy

You can use SignalR to create independent persistent connections to your clients. At this point SignalR doesn't scale that well as it is only possible to run it on one worker/server out of the box. There is a feature request for scaling but it's not done yet. Depending on how many users you are counting on getting the first months, I would say SignalR is the way to go and then when you need scaling you can improve SignalR to be scaleable as it is open source. :)

2012-04-11 08:01
by Niels Hanberg

I will need to go cross-platform (Java and Obj-C) in the future and I'm pretty sure that SignalR is .NET specific. About how many users could it support simultaneously - tamaslnagy 2012-04-11 14:21

Yes SignalR is .NET specific on your server side, but you can use any client language to communicate with it (Javascript, Java, Obj-C). The only think is that you will have to program the clients if they doesn't exist. To start with you can use one of the clients that is already made for SignalR like the jquery library - Niels Hanberg 2012-04-13 07:33

I don't know how many users you will be able to have simultaneously on one server, as it depends on how many requests each user/client makes and so on, but if you get SignalR to scale you should be able to have as many users as you would like - Niels Hanberg 2012-04-13 07:41

Thanks for your help. I think I will go with SignalR. According to Scott Hanselman, SignalR should be able to handle 10,000-100,100 connections simultaneously. So I don't believe I'll have too much trouble if this true - tamaslnagy 2012-04-13 14:25