Computer networks is a subject that in paper looks cool, but due to some external factors me and one of my friends (we had to do a project together for this subject) don't really like. In fact, after the final exam we were pretty sure we were failing that class.

The surprise came when we got our grades and we both passed. We had to do something to celebrate, so we decided to make an online tic tac toe game using the things we had barely learned.

The idea was to make it similar to these games where you run the client that handles the interface and the input collection, that is connected to the server wich handles all game logic. Doing this is unnecessarily complicated for a game like this, but I wanted to do it this way.

We ended splitting the job kind of like in front and back end. I ended up handling all of the communication between the players and the server, and my friend focussed on making the interface and the game logic. (Btw he refused to make the functions he made an external library so I had to just put it on the client file and it ended up being incredibly messy.)

We used as a basis a simple client-server program we had to make for our class wich was a server that counted the number of vowels the client sent. The program was originaly in c, but mid way we started using c++ so it became a really ugly mess of the two languages.

The way the game works is very simple. The server has an array wich represents the board. Once both clients are connected, the servers sends them the board, and in each player's turn, the client presents the board to the playes, and they select the number of the board square in wich they want to play. The client then sends that number to the server wich then updates the board. This process is repeated until the server detects someone has winned. When someone wins, the server enables the end flag, wich is really just the last element of the board array, and the game ends.

Even tough this game is made to be played via a local network, me and my friend were able to play it coneccting through ssh to our uni's remote work network and running there the server and the clients.

I had to work through many things not working while making this, but in the end it was really cool seeing our game being played "online", and it certainly was a good celebrations of having passed one of the worst subjects this far.

If you want to play this yourself, or just take a look at the code (I'm sorry), just take a look at the github repo .

Thanks for reading :)