Bored at work? Play pong in your terminal over the network!
The game interface was inspired by this excellent tutorial on using tcell to develop a TUI. I extended the game to support networked play between two players using a streaming gRPC API.
This guide assumes you have a working go installation.
To install the game:
go install github.com/qsymmachus/netpong@latest
To start a game, one player will need to start in server mode:
netpong --server
Once in this mode, the game will wait for another player to connect. By default, the game listens for connections on port 60049; you can choose a different port using the --port flag.
Once a server is listening, another player can connect and start a game:
netpong --address localhost:60049
In this example we're playing against a game on the same host; use a different address and port as required.
Once connected the game will begin. The local player's paddle is on the right-hand side, and the remote player's paddle is on the left-hand side. Move your paddle up and down using the arrow keys. The first player to score 5 points wins.
The game has some limitations I plan to fix in the future. Here's my roadmap in rough priority order:
- Always consistent ball positioning. Only the paddle position is shared state between games; for ball positioning, the game relies on the ball deterministically following the same path on screens of the same size. This doesn't work if each player has a different screen size.
- Restart the game from the "Game over" screen
- Configurable victory score
- Beeps and boops when the ball collides
As you're actively developing the game, you can compile and play it with this command:
go run .The game uses a streaming gRPC API for networked play. Protobuf files and generated code are found in ./netpong.
If you modify protos/netpong.proto, you'll need to regenerate the gRPC code with this command:
protoc --go_out=. --go_opt=paths=source_relative \
--go-grpc_out=. --go-grpc_opt=paths=source_relative \
netpong/netpong.proto