Pulling game mechanic updates in an iOS strategy game?_问答_开发者

I'm planning on developing a multiplayer strategy game for the iOS platform. However,开发者_如何学编程 being a strategy game with multiple "units", there will likely be imbalances in gameplay, that will need to be addressed with constant mechanic-tweaking (upgrading / nerfing certain units).

The easiest way to accomplish this would simply be to change the mechanics within the app itself, and constantly submit updates to Apple. However, updates take time to propagate through Apple's review process (so the changes wouldn't be instantaneous), and I would need to do checks to see if all the players in the game are running the same version of the game, force users to update to the latest version of the game, etc.

What I'm thinking of doing instead is something similar to what the game Uniwar does. Every time the game is launched, it appears to check if there are any gameplay tweaks available, and if there are, it downloads the updates (and shows an update message to the user detailing what has changed).

However, as a relatively new programmer, I don't really know what would be the easiest way of accomplishing this. Would I host a text file online containing the unit statistics, and get the game to check that file for changes? Or is there some better, more efficient way? And if I were to do it this way, how would I do it?

First, ensure that your rules are some sort of resource you can easily change (be it binary or text-based). The most convenient way of updating these would be to periodically poll a server, most conveniently using the HTTP protocol, fetching updates as needed. The way I see it, there are two ways of doing this.

The first method uses the excellent caching abilities of the HTTP protocol, and as such requires a server (and client library) that understands these. The basic idea would be to have a copy of the latest version of the game mechanics published on a server (say, to http://example.org/mechanics.gz, and then have the client issue conditional GET requests with the If-modified-since header set to the time the last update check was performed. The HTTP protcol will den effectively do the rest for you, issuing a 304 Not modified if there is no update, and sending the new mechanics if there is one. This method has the disadvantage that the whole mechanics file has to be downloaded on every update (no diffs can be used), and that old versions won't be available, but it has an appealing simplicity.

The second method would consist of having a list of updates (well, their URI, ID and release date), say http://example.org/updates.xml, which the client pulls on every poll. The client then checks if there are any updates it doesn't have, and downloads and applies these in chronological order. Using this method, old updates can be made available (and will have permanent links), and diffs may be used. This is useful if history is important or if game mechanic files are large.

The format of the file doesn't really matter -- use whatever works for you. The key to being able to tune the gameplay, I think, is to turn the rules of the game into objects that you can configure. If the rules are all objects, you can do things like changing the order in which they're applied, the weight given to each one, the conditions under which a rule becomes effective, etc. You might have an object that's responsible for managing and properly applying the rules, basically a "rule model." Once you have that, all you need to do is to implement NSCoding in your rule and rule model classes and you can easily write and read rule configurations.