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copied!<p>While updating a database seems like overkill, it has advantages when it comes time to scale up, as you can have multiple webheads talking to one backend.</p> <p>A larger concern is how you communicate the game state to the clients. While a full update of the game state from time to time ensures that any changes are caught and all clients remain in synchronization even if they miss a message, gamestate is often quite large.</p> <p>Consider as well that usually you want gamestate messages to trigger animations or other display updates to portray the action (for example, of a piece moves, it shouldn't just appear at the destination in most cases... it should move across the board). </p> <p>Because of that, one solution that combines the best of both worlds is to keep a database that collects all of the <em>actions</em> performed in a table, with sequential IDs. When a client requests an update, it can give all the actions <em>after</em> the last one it knew about, and the client can "act out" the moves. This means even if an request fails, it can simply retry the request and none of the actions will be lost.</p> <p>The server can then maintain an internal view of the gamestate as well, from the same data. It can also reject illegal actions and prevent them from entering the game action table (and thus prevent other clients from being incorrectly updated).</p> <p>Finally, because the server does have the "one true" gamestate, the clients can periodically check against that (which will allow you to find errors in your client or server code). Because the server database should be considered the primary, you can retransmit the entire gamestate to any client that gets incorrect state, so minor client errors won't (potentially) ruin the experience (except perhaps a pause while the state is downloaded).</p>

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