First things first. Before jumping into the core concepts of Lemur, our fully managed online multiplayer development platform (whew!), make sure to read up on the basics:
Table of contents
Ready? Alright, let’s dive into the wonderful world of Ringtail Lemur!
First, let’s just acknowledge how much transformation the gaming industry has undergone over the years, with online multiplayer experiences taking the lead. Game developers are tasked with crafting realistic and immersive gaming experiences that resonate with millions of players, all while ensuring uninterrupted gameplay. Achieving this goal requires extensive work, expertise, and attention to detail, as developers strive to create a seamless and captivating virtual world for gamers to explore and enjoy.
To combat these challenges, we created Lemur.
What is Lemur?
Lemur is an anything-to-anything networking solution designed for streamlined and effective development of online multiplayer games. You can focus on what matters most to you – like perfecting your game vision – without dealing with the complexity of networking. Lemur offers flexibility and uncomplicated functionality, including features addressing the modern challenges and workflows of game development. The Lemur Cloud also provides a secure and reliable online experience, with robust protection against cheating and other threats.
What is anything-to-anything networking?
With Lemur, you are no longer restricted by conventional structures like Rooms, Worlds, or Matches. Instead, the emphasis is on seamless data management and synchronization across different clients. As part of Lemur’s core concepts, this approach zeroes in on the dynamics of game elements and their interplay.
How does this benefit you? You now have the freedom to blend genres and design principles, facilitating creativity that often requires sizeable resources. Lemur is reshaping the game development paradigm, affording you increased versatility.
Think about the possibility of crafting an MMO where players can seamlessly transition to a session-based card game tournament. Other players could watch the card game play out on a table in a tavern, or even slip a card to the players in the match. Or perhaps a space exploration game that integrates round-based confrontations for planetary dominance. The possibilities are truly staggering!
From Lemur’s perspective: everything revolves around efficiently organizing, changing, and sharing data.
Now, let’s explore Lemur’s core concepts a bit more.
Lemur is a comprehensive tool that enables you to create multiplayer games with ease and efficiency. The goal with this blog post is to explain main principles behind Lemur’s functionality and design, and how they can help you achieve your game development goals. With Lemur, the focus shifts towards organizing and managing your game data in a smart and strategic way, allowing you to concentrate more on gameplay aspects and less on the technical details.
By understanding the principles outlined below, you will discover the benefits and possibilities of Lemur and how it can enhance your game creation experience.
Lemur’s anything-to-anything networking technology empowers developers to blend game genres and mechanics, allowing them to explore a new horizon of development possibilities.
Multiplayer challenges
Developing a scalable and reliable multiplayer game is a challenging task that demands specialized knowledge and skills across various domains. These include server development, cloud computing, security, networking, data analysis, and more.
A game developer needs to consider factors such as the architecture, infrastructure, testing, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of the product. This means familiarity with tools, frameworks, methodologies, best practices, and applying them to perfection.
With Lemur, you can focus on features that matter most to you and on adding value to your players, while Lemur takes care of the rest.
Key features
Lemur provides unique features, such as:
- Fully managed networking solution: eliminates the hassle of managing and scaling resources.
- One code base for Game Logic: centralizes functionality, ensuring consistency and saving development time.
- Fully deterministic: utilizes determinism as the standard approach for consistent and reliable gameplay experiences.
Core features
Lemur delivers AAA technology that makes industry-leading features available to everyone:
- Data persistence: achieved seamlessly without any special implementation.
- Effortless integration: compatibility with various game engines such as Unity, Godot, and .Net.
- User-friendly developer portal: aids in managing projects, environments, deployments, and provides analysis and testing tools.
- Server authoritative: ensures security and stability for all players.
- Local simulation: enables a smooth and responsive gameplay experience.
- Reliable and scalable architecture: handles high demand and growth.
- Optimized networking stack: enhances performance and reduces bandwidth consumption.
- Clean, strongly typed API: simplifies development and maintenance processes.
- Source generators: reduce overhead and improve performance.
- User authentication: allows users to integrate with existing providers or use their own.
Core concept
Game elements
Games are made up of various logical components and objects, each representing different parts of the game like players, NPCs, terrains, vehicles, and more. In Lemur, these objects are known as Entities. These Entities form the foundation of the game’s data structure. Each Entity has properties, such as a player’s name, health, inventory, and position, collectively known as State. State objects can be utilized across different Entities. For instance, if you create an inventory State, it can be applied both to a player and an NPC.
Using this approach offers a modular, building-block method, enhancing the effectiveness of the development process.
Game logic
Entities and their associated States in Lemur can be modified through Behaviors, which represent the game logic and align with the workflow familiar to developers accustomed to 3D engines.
Data modifications are facilitated through various methods:
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Interactions from clients and users, such as player inputs, which are managed through Actions.
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Modifications can also be triggered by specific systems or other Behaviors, which are handled as Events.
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Moreover, Behaviors can be configured to execute at regular intervals, a process known as ticking, which simulates the continuous flow of a game loop.
Dynamic grouping
Lemur is built on the concept of dynamic grouping which enables Entities to function independently or as part of a broader collective known as a Group. Clients have the ability to engage with several Entities or Groups at once. These Groups can embody typical gaming scenarios, like individual game sessions or specific world regions. Leveraging our advanced deterministic technology, the size and scale of a Group is tailored to its intended role and the nature of the game in development. Entities integrated into a Group are automatically equipped with all essential resources to perform optimally within that Group.
In conclusion, Lemur’s sophisticated system of dynamic Group and Entities, bolstered by deterministic technology, offers a highly flexible and efficient framework for game development, enhancing both the creative process and the player’s interactive experience.
Advanced synchronization
Entities and Groups in Lemur are effortlessly synchronized across all clients who opt-in for their updates, a mechanism known as Subscriptions. Through these Subscriptions, we achieve precise control over the data sent to clients, enabling selective sharing or withholding of information as needed. Our advanced network infrastructure guarantees a rapid and reliable synchronization experience.
Local simulation
Lemur integrates local simulation to minimize response times and dependence on external data, which can lead to more reliable and smoother gameplay. By leveraging data from subscriptions, the client can efficiently process and execute in-game logic locally. This method ensures instant availability of all crucial data to support game dynamics, interactions, and real-time decision making without significant latency.
Server-side safeguarding
The Lemur Cloud infrastructure rigorously focuses on preserving game integrity and security.
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Server authoritative processes validate local game simulations, ensuring they match the current system state.
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Critical game logic is executed exclusively on the server, hidden from players, to bolster security and ensure fair play.
With that, we hope you enjoyed this first introduction to Ringtail Lemur core concepts!
More insights and information will be posted regularly here on the Lemur blog. Also, make sure to sign up to our newsletter and connect with us on LinkedIn to stay up to date.
Also, here’s an exciting opportunity: if you’re a development studio who would like to start using Lemur for your next game project, send us a few lines about your studio and project at hello [at] ringtailinteractive [dot] com and we’ll be in touch!
To read all chapters of our Multiplayer Development 101 blog mini-series, click the links below:
