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Building a Real-Time Multiplayer Game Server in Rust

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Welcome, brave coder, to the world of Rust-powered game servers! In this tutorial, we’ll build a real-time multiplayer game server in Rust — this is the central hub for player connections, real-time movement, and, of course, the lifeblood of any game: message passing. We’ll look at each function and go over the fun details of how our little server works.

Overview

Our server does a few key things:

1. Starts a TCP socket server and listens for players.
2. Tracks each player’s position and sends updates to all players.
3. Handles messages from players with grace, whether it’s movement or the goodbye wave when a player disconnects.

Full Code (Reference)

Here’s the full main.rs that powers our multiplayer game server, in case you need to refer back to it:

use tokio::net::{TcpListener, TcpStream};
use tokio::io::AsyncWriteExt;
use std::sync::Arc;
use tokio::sync::{broadcast, Mutex};
use log::{info, warn, error};
use serde::{Deserialize, Serialize};
use uuid::Uuid;

#[derive(Serialize, Deserialize, Debug)]
struct GameState {
    players: std::collections::HashMap<String, (f32…