Beta chapters of my upcoming book Development & Deployment of Multiplayer Online Games seem to gain in popularity. I’ve even got more than one request to make a PDF out of them, so they can be read offline in a e-book reader such as Kindle. Ok, here they go: PDFs of beta chapters from the book.

Note that PDFs are not formatted for the book, and certainly do not represent “how the book will look when it is published”. It is HTML mechanically reformatted to PDF, with the only purpose being to allow reading of the same-thing-which-you-can-read-on-site but offline. It should be also better suitable for printing.


Chapter I. Business Requirements
Chapter II. Game Entities and Interactions
Chapter III. On Cheating, P2P, and [non-]Authoritative Servers
Chapter IV. DIY vs Re-Use: In Search of Balance
Chapter V(a). Modular Architecture. Client-Side. Graphics
Chapter V(b). Modular Architecture. Client-Side. Programming Languages
Chapter V(c). Modular Architecture. Client-Side. On Debugging Distributed Systems, Deterministic Logic, and Finite State Machines
Chapter V(d). Modular Architecture. Client-Side. Client Architecture Diagram, Threads, and Game Loop
Chapter VI(a). Modular Architecture. Server-Side. Naïve, Web-Based, and Classical Deployment Architectures
Chapter VI(b). Modular Architecture. Server-Side. Front-End Servers and Client-Side Random Load Balancing
Chapter VI(c). Modular Architecture. Server-Side. Eternal Windows-vs-Linux Debate
Chapter VI(d). Modular Architecture. Server-Side. Asynchronous Processing for Finite State Machines/Actors: from plain event processing to Futures (with OO and Lambda Call Pyramids in between)
Chapter VI(e). Modular Architecture. Server-Side. Programming Languages
Chapter VII(a). Modular Architecture. Protocols. RTT, Input Lag, and Mitigation
Chapter VII(b). Modular Architecture. Protocols. World States and Reducing Traffic
Chapter VII(c). Modular Architecture. Protocols. Point-to-Point Communications and Non-blocking RPCs
Chapter VII(d). Modular Architecture. Protocols. IDL: Encodings, Mappings, and Backward Compatibility
Chapter VIII. Unity 5 vs UE4 vs Photon vs DIY
Chapter IX. Pre-Coding Checklist: Things Everybody Hates, but Everybody Needs Them Too. From Source Control to Coding Guidelines

VOL.1 COMBINED (11.1MBytes, 355 pages) NOT FORMATTED AS A BOOK, BETA QUALITY; now with table of contents, thanks to http://pdfmerge.com/


PDFs of further chapters will be added here as they’re published on the site. To navigate through HTML version of the book, please see Table of Contents.

Acknowledgment

Conversion from HTML to PDF has been performed by http://www.htmlpdf.com/ (with some minor CSS tweaking on our side). Merge of different chapters has been performed supposedly by the same team, via http://pdfmerge.com/ . I am really surprised with the quality of the conversion they provide (and their merge was the only one which was able to merge navigation)… Thanks guys and gals, you’ve done a wonderful job with this converter and merger!