PragPub 2009-11: Issue #5 by The Pragmatic Bookshelf

Author:The Pragmatic Bookshelf
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: PragPub—Monthly Magazine
Publisher: The Pragmatic Bookshelf, LLC
Published: 2009-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

Bonjour, iPhone

Using Game Kit to Network iPhone Apps Easily

by Bill Dudney

Bill walks you through building a rudimentary multiplayer game for the iPhone using Apple’s Bonjour-based Game Kit technology.

A phone is a communication device. The iPhone is an application platform. Some of the best-selling applications are games. So what’s more natural than to create a multiplayer game that two or more people can play on their iPhones?

Unfortunately, adding networking to an app can be a major pain.

Fortunately, the iPhone has some great technology to make that job much easier. From the beginning (all 18 months ago) the iPhone SDK has included zero-configuration networking via a technology called Bonjour. With Bonjour you can broadcast services offered by your app, and other apps can find those services easily. But much of the code to get that started and send data back and forth between the two instances can be tedious and error-prone.

Enter iPhone SDK 3.0 and the Game Kit. Built on top of Bonjour, Game Kit removes the tedious setup and communication code required to connect two applications to each other. It makes building multi-player games much easier.

And in fact, the typical use case for the Game Kit is to connect two instances of a game together for multi-player action. Let’s do that.

We are going to build a really simple game that displays colored disks on two iPhones. When the user taps on one of these disks, the disk will spin and fade out on both devices. A really simple game, to be sure; but the stuff you learn here can easily be transferred to your real application to allow it to network your users together.

There are three phases to using Game Kit:

First, you have to connect the two instances of the application.

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