J2ME Multiplayer Games

The development of J2ME Multiplayer Games project began as a course assignment by two final year students - Shahzada M. Redwan and Zeenat Farzana under the course CSI 332 Software Engineering Sessional, taught by Mr. Kamruddin Md. Nur, lecturer, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Stamford University Bangladesh.

The concept behind the project was the brainchild of Shahzada M. Redwan. With the help of exceptional user interface programming skills of Zeenat Farzana and internet programming skills of Shahzada M. Redwan, the project was undertaken by the two young developers.

At the end of the 1990s, the PC gaming world has been taken aloof by a storm of multiplayer online/network games. The idea was to play a game with/against an individual or a group of real people instead of computer’s artificial intelligence using a different PC at a different location. It spiced up the game by making it more competitive and challenging. Using the internet, the multiplayer games can be played against anybody no matter who that is or wherever he/she is.

Since cellphones are gradually becoming an alternative to our daily PC activities, it is about time to add this amazing functionality of playing multiplayer games to cellphones. Today’s cellphones already feature built-in J2ME games but they do not come with any multiplayer games. With this project the multiplayer gaming culture can be introduced to the clan of cellphone users. The users need to use their internet connection to register/log in to the game server and start playing the game. But first they have to get a copy of the project *.jad and/or *.jar file(s) to their cellphones. Running them from the cellphone will authenticate the user and connect the user with the game server. After being connected, users can choose another online user as their opponent. The demo version of the project only has two simple games called “Dots” and “Tic Tac Toe”. These games were specially developed for their simplicity of coding and implementing the concepts of the project.

This project has used programming languages - J2ME for the client application (also called midlet) and PHP for game server application. NetBeans 5.0 IDE has been extensively used throughout the development of the project for coding the J2ME client application/game. A back-end database has been used to keep track of the users and their statuses - online, offline, waiting, playing, etc. MySQL 5.0 was used as the RDBMS at the back-end of the Game Server.

We express our gratitude to authors Mr. Kim Topley and Mr. James Koogh, whose books “J2ME in a Nutshell” and “J2ME: The Complete Reference” respectively, has helped us throughout the project in learning and working with J2ME programming language.

We are also thankful to all those open-source software developers and supporters, because of whom, we had the opportunity to work with pristine software and development tools such as, Apache HTTP Server 2.2, MySQL Server 5.0, PHP 5.0, Sun’s J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.2, and Sun’s NetBeans 5.0 IDE.

We also thank our friends, family and all those people who has shown their interest in our work and supported us throughout the development of this project by giving us important feedback.

We would like to also thank Mr. Kamruddin M. Nur who has taught us the basics of software development including usage of UML extensively for our project. This project was well documented upon his supervision and persistence.

Please contact at s.redwan@gmail.com for further information, comments, feedback, and queries.

Thank you.