Up until this point we've been using dedicated servers to run Tales of Fortune. Dedicated servers are expensive to manage especially early in development therefore we have opted to creating a new solution which will both save us money and allow for a more flexible system. This means that now all servers will be running through peer-to-peer, one player will be hosting the server on their local PC and the other players will be connecting to that user through Steam.
Making this change has been a hurdle to overcome because as mentioned earlier the game has always been running using a dedicated server architecture which means that quite late in development we've had to change to a new system. So we are happy to announce that peer-to-peer is now functioning and running. We will be using the upcoming week to test and ensure that it works properly.
We are still hoping to be able to use dedicated servers for all competitive games, therefore dedicated servers will be a system that we will keep exploring in the future but for now the upcoming demo will be exclusively running using peer-to-peer.
We've also been working on making an enhanced lobby system allowing players to connect to each other using the Steam API. This means that the players wont have to worry about port forwarding to connect to each other. The new lobby system features the ability to create custom games that other players can join through our lobby hosting system.
Next we will be working on creating an automatic matchmaking system where players can connect to other players without having to worry about creating any lobbies. This will also be the backbone system for any upcoming competitive game modes in the future.
- Hadi