April 2012

When a game network attaches external integrations, such as remote wallets, asynchronous communications becomes important. This can be any kind of integration, but in this blog post we'll assume it's a wallet we're talking with. So, what's our problem?

• If the network has several operators no operator must block players from another operator. If the wallet operation is synchronous, one call to an integration may lock the entire table. It is more acceptable if there is only one operator, but when there's several, we must make sure no-one is penalized by another players operator.
• Similarly, we may have other integrations that takes time even for a single operator and don't want to block game play during it's operation. This might include interactions with national gambling authorities, etc.

So here' a wallet example: A player needs to buy in after having lost all money at the table. The game server asks the player if he wants to buy in and if the player accepts the buy in he's placed in a "buy-in in progress" state while the game server sorts out the actual money transfer. Note that the game play may well start at the table with the player in a sit-out state if the buy-in takes a long time.

1. Send buy-in information to player
2. On buy-in request from player, set player state to "buy-in in progress"
3. Hand-off buy-in operation from the game to a wallet service
4. When buy in is complete, wallet service notifies game
5. Game sets player as "in game" and notifies the same

Easy, huh? Now let's do some coding. A word of warning though, I'll write it down off the cuff so you'd better off treating the following as pseudo code, but it should give you an idea on how it's done.