Chapter 7.   Play against a Live Opponent with SMS

Short Message Service, or SMS, is a relatively primitive technology, originally designed in the late 1980s for devices with a lot less computing power than a BlackBerry smartphone. BlackBerry users can access their email on their smartphones and typically have phone service contracts that include data transfer measured in megabytes. So it seems crazy to bother with tiny packets containing only 140 bytes of data! But there's a reason why SMS is still a good choice for game communications: it has enormous and widespread support.

By some estimates, the SMS protocol has well over two billion active users, making it the most widely used data application on the planet. So when you base your game on SMS, you know that it will work for users all over the world without any unpleasant surprises, despite the fact that operator networks may differ from each other in terms of some of their more advanced offerings.

In this chapter, you'll create the SMS Checkers game, shown at the top of the page. Since a move on a checkerboard can be easily described in a few bytes, each move can be sent in an SMS message, with plenty of room left over for one player to send a message to the other player along with the move.

Downloads

• The zipped code for this chapter (113 KB). Last updated: 7th March 2010.
   

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Dr. Carol Hamer
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Dr. Andrew Davison
E-mail: ad@fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th
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