Connect Four 3D

There is a board game called “Connect Four 3D”, in real life it looks like this:

And as part of my efforts to learn Rust in 2023, I implemented a virtual version of it.

Note that 3D here has a double meaning: first of all, the board game itself has “3D” in its name, since the players need to build a row of four tokens in a 3-dimensional matrix. And second, this project uses a 3D engine (this one: kiss3d) to implement a virtual version of the game.

It happened that I and my relatives played it a lot, and I wanted to have a virtual version of it, with network multiplayer, so we can play remotely.

There are some on the internet (e.g. this one), but none that I know of supports network multiplayer: either local human vs human, or human vs AI (and a poor one).

So here we go, I created one, with the network multiplayer supported: https://github.com/dimonomid/connectfour-3d.

You obviously need Rust to build it and run: https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install.

You can run the game either in local mode (human-human on the local machine) or network mode (human-human over the network). AI is not implemented (and no plans to do that yet).

Local mode is when both human players are using the same computer. After installing Rust and cloning the repo, run this from the repo root:

$ cargo run --bin connectfour-3d -- -o local

As of May 2023, I'm running a server on my machine, and you can use it if you want. No guarantees though as to whether I'll continue running it, etc.

To run in network mode, connecting to the default server (i.e. mine), to a game called mygame:

$ cargo run --bin connectfour-3d -- -o network --game mygame

Once there are two players connected with the same game ID (in this case, mygame), the game will start. If one of the players leaves (e.g. due to a network issue, or whatever else), they can connect back and resume the game, as long as the other player stays. When both players leave the game, the server forgets it.

When the game is over (i.e. one of the players won), starting a new game is not yet implemented in the UI. So just restart the app.

You can run the server yourself, like this:

$ cargo run --bin server
...
Listening on: 0.0.0.0:7248

As you see, it listens on the port 7248.

And then, run the network client as described above, but also pass the flag --url ws://127.0.0.1:7248:

$ cargo run --bin connectfour-3d -- -o network --url ws://127.0.0.1:7248 --game mygame

Once again, here it is: https://github.com/dimonomid/connectfour-3d.