DPongPy

Didactical implementation of PONG as an online multiplayer game, aimed at exemplifying distributed systems.

Relevant features

• Supports offline game (1-4 players, no AI)
• No points, no winner, just 1-4 paddles and a ball
• Supports online game (1-4 players, no AI) via UDP

How to install

pip install dpongpy

How to play

Run python -m dpongpy --help to see the available options.

Two modes are available:

• local for playing offline (all players sharing the same keyboard)
• centralised for online (all players connecting to a central server)

When in centralised mode, the server must be started first, and the clients must connect to it. In this case, the server is called coordinator, and the clients are called terminals. You should start the coordinator first, and then the terminals. The coordinator instance of dpongpy shall keep track of the game state and update it according to the inputs coming from the terminal instances. When a coordinator is started, no window is shown, yet logs may be printed on the console. When a terminal is started, a window is shown, and the game can be played (provided that the coordinator is running). Terminals may observe that the ball is reset to the central position whenever a player joins or leaves the game.

When in local mode, the game will include, by default, 2 paddles and the ball. Users may specify which and how many paddles to include in their game via the --size option (-s). After the --side option, you shall specify the side of the paddle (i.e. left, right, up, or down). You should also specify which key mappings to use for each paddle, via the --keys option (-k). Available key mappings are wasd, ijkl, arrows, and numpad. You should specify the key mapping for each paddle, in the order they were specified via the --side option. Therefore, default options are: -s left -k wasd -s right -k arrows.

When in centralised mode, it is up to terminals to choose their paddle and the corresponding key mapping. This is done, once again, via the --side and --keys options. In this case, however, there is no default choice, and the user must specify the side and key mapping of the paddle they want to control.

Project structure

Overview:

<root directory>
├── CHANGELOG.md            # Changelog for the last stable release
├── dpongpy                 # Main package
│   ├── __init__.py         # Main module: here we implement the game loop business logic for the local game
│   ├── __main__.py         # Main module's entry point: this is where argument parsing occurs
│   ├── log.py              # Logging utilities
│   ├── model.py            # Model module: here we define classes for Pong-related domain entities (paddle, ball, game)
│   ├── controller          # Controller package
│   │   ├── __init__.py     # Controller module: here we define interfaces for input and event handlers
│   │   └── local.py        # Local controller module: here we implement the afore mentioned interfaces in a non-distributed way
│   ├── view.py             # View module: here we define the game rendering logic
│   └── remote              # Remote package
│       ├── __init__.py     # Remote module: here we define interfaces for remote communication (client, server, address) in a protocol-agnostic way
│       ├── udp.py          # UDP module: here we implement the afore mentioned interfaces in a UDP-specific way
│       ├── presentation.py # Presentation module: facilities for (de)serializing Pong-related domain entities
│       └── centralised     # Centralised package
│           └── __init__.py # Centralised module: here we re-define the game loop business logic to work as either centralised server or a terminal client
├── LICENSE                 # License file
├── package.json            # NPM package file (for semantic-release)
├── package-lock.json       # NPM package lock file (for semantic-release)
├── poetry.lock             # Poetry lock file for fixing Python dependencies
├── poetry.toml             # Poetry configuration file
├── pyproject.toml          # Project metadata definition, compliant to the Poetry standard
├── README.md               
├── release.config.js       # semantic-release configuration file (for release on PyPI)
├── renovate.json           # Renovate configuration file (for automatic dependency updates)
├── requirements.txt        # Use this to automatically install Poetry dependencies, then run `poetry install` to actually install the project dependencies
└── tests                   # Unit tests of the project: the file names are self-explanatory
    ├── test_model.py
    ├── test_presentation.py
    └── test_udp.py