| services | platforms | author |
|---|---|---|
service-fabric |
dotnet |
t-anmena |
This reference application demonstrates how to begin building an end-to-end online multiplayer game on Service Fabric by taking advantage of Reliable Services. This application will help demonstrate how to build any type of online application, but also implements some solutions that meet the requirements of modern real-time MMOs.
If you have no previous knowledge of building with Service Fabric, .NET, or game design, this is still the sample application for you. There is other useful information about this application linked at the bottom of the page, and the application comes with a Reading List to help you get started on concepts. As you learn the application more thoroughly, if you want to understand the implementation of a new feature, there is a document on it here.
The context of this sample is an online presence-based game in which users can login and join rooms. In these rooms users can see every other player in the room, move around the room, and change features about themselves. Accounts and player information are persisted, and players can join any room they would like at each new login. This sample application was designed to have a very simple architecture yet be able to scale massively. It is built on three services:
- Web front-end Service
- Offline Player Service (Cold Storage)
- Online Rooms Service (Hot Storage)
The web service routes requests from clients to the appropriate services and performs some data validation. The offline player service holds long term player data like metrics and player settings and holds game data when a player is offline. Upon login, that game data is moved to the online rooms service, which stores that player data in a room with other players, so that data can be quickly gathered and updated. Upon logout, that data is moved back to cold storage. To understand more about architecture, there is a document on it here.
Using Service Fabric's stateful services, each of these services can maintain its own data, rather than relying a shared monolithic data base. This allows each service to scale independently using Service Fabric's stateful partitioning. In terms of gameplay, this also decreases the distance of the data to the client, which means faster response times, important for online games.
This application only depends on Service Fabric, meaning deployment should be a breeze:
- Download and install the Visual Studio 2017 Service Fabric SDK here.
- Open the .sln solution file in Visual Studio 2017.
- Allow it to download any NuGet packages it needs.
- Press F5 to run. If there is an error, make sure it is building to
x64configuration on the top bar. - Open the application from the local web endpoint:
localhost:8081
Deploying the application to the cloud is almost as easy as deploying it on your local box:
- Create a cluster to host your Service Fabric application. If you want to deploy to your own endpoint, skip to step
2. To create a cluster on Azure, use the guide that can be found here. Below are the minimum necessary settings for this application:
If you are deploying the application for personal use only, you can choose to leave the cluster unsecured.
-
Edit the file at
SampleGame/SampleGame/ApplicationParameters/Cloud.xml. Where it says<ClusterConnectionParameters ConnectionEndpoint=""/>enter the client endpoint provided to you by the cluster you set up. -
Right-click the application project in Visual Studio and select "Publish". Choose your cloud publish profile:
Enter the client endpoint that you just provided to your Cloud.xml, if it is not already there.
- Connect to the game at your endpoint, at port
8081. - Look at your Service Fabric Explorer at your endpoint, at port
19080. Here you can check on the state of your application. You can simulate failover by restarting a node using the small menu next to the node name.
To run a number of integration tests that check the basic end-to-end request patterns most commonly seen, go to localhost:8081/Test.html, or your own endpoint, and the tests will run automatically.
This application was designed to be readable to someone without prior knowledge of Service Fabric. All important functions are documented XML-style in /docs, and there are also some general documents to support the readings:
- Learn important Service Fabric concepts to support your readthrough of the code
- Learn about the application architecture and data flow.
- Walk through the implementation of a new feature in the game.
This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.