From the time on when I first got my hands on networking in general, Ethernet and especially the Java Net API I was really fascinated by the fact that this technology connects devices and allows for a hughe pile of use cases. My first experience with networking and »social-networking« was the good old net send command on a Windows 2000 network. It was a huge fun to hound my classmates.

When I got introduced to Java I really wanted to create my own network protocol like SMTP or POP3 and send messages over the network. The only missing thing was a rather interesting scenario. I eventually selected the famous SameGame and thought it would be a nice experiment to create a variant which consists of a speed run between participants which can thus compete against each other.

Details

The architecture of Neptune is fairly simple: a server allows users to register or login into. The connected clients can then participate at a game. But only between two and four clients (players) can play a game. As soon as all clients are ready the game starts. The game is finished if no further draw is possible. The player with the highest point count wins - every removed set of blocks yields a specific amount of points (see com.neptune.model.DefaultGameCounter class for details).

During development of Neptune I spend special attention to the architectural design of the application. I used a modified MVC design pattern along with interfaces and abstract classes to organize the code in a neat and orderly way. The source code repository of Neptune provides also the protocol specification.

Recapitulating I can say that I learned a lot about structuring source code back then (2009). It was a fun project but the most satisfying part was the fact that my computer science teacher dedicated a lesson to this project and all my classmates »tested« Neptune. That was a fun lesson for everyone.

Screenshots of Neptune

The initial window allows the selection of the program mode: it can be started as server or client.

In client mode Neptune needs the IP address and TCP port of the Neptune server to connect to ...

... or in server mode Neptune only needs to know on which port to listen. By default it's 6666.

The server GUI is pretty simple: it shows all client connections and the history of the current or last game (if any). Furthermore clients can be disconnected ;-)

On the client side one starts a game by entering a nickname ...

... and one then gets the ready screen. If all participants clicked the PLAY button the game starts.

A typical view of a competition between two players.

The finish screen shows the results of the match.

Neptue allows for a maximum of four players.