Best way to implement mouse-based movement in MMOG

Posted by fiftyeight on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by fiftyeight
Published on 2011-11-21T20:44:07Z Indexed on 2011/11/22 2:12 UTC
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I want to design an MMO where players click the destination they want to walk to with their mouse and the character moves there, similar to Runescape in this manner.

I think it should be easier than keyboard movement since the client can simply send the server the destination each time the player clicks on a destination.

The main thing I'm trying to decide is what to do when there are obstacles in the way. It's no problem to implement a simple path-finding solution on the client, the question is if the server will do path-finding as well, since it'll probably take too much Computation power from the server.

What I though is that when there is an obstacle the client will send only the first coordinate it plans to go to and then when he gets there he'll send the next coordinate automatically.

For example if there is a rock in the way the character will decide on a route that is made of two destinations so it goes around the rock and when it arrives at the first destination it sends the next coordinate.

That way if the player changes destination is the middle he won't send unnecessary information.

Is this a good way to implement it and is there a standard way MMOGs usually do it?

EDIT: I should also mention that the server will make sure all movements are legal and there aren't any walls in the way etc. In the way I wrote it should be quite easy since all movements will be sent in straight lines so the server will just check there aren't any obstacles along that line.

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