Click here to access the Github page for this project!
PiMafia is a client-server structured network and software that allows its users to play a game of Mafia with each other. It can be run between devices on any Local Area Network (LAN).
To be able to run PiMafia, there are a few simple dependencies. The first is having Python 3 installed on your computer. The second is to have the PySimpleGUI library installed in this version of Python. The server device does not need the PySimpleGUI library installed.
Actually running PiMafia is quite simple! One device (Raspberry Pi) must act as the server, and other devices (anything that can run Python 3) must act as clients, thus connecting to the server. For both server and client devices, the first step is simply downloading the codebase, which can be found here.
To run the server (Raspberry Pi), simply execute the “GameServer.py” file from the codebase. The user should then be prompted to enter a port number. The port can be any number from 1 to 65535, but ports below 1024 may be protected and only available to superusers.
To run the client, simply execute the “GameClient.py” file from the codebase. The user should then be prompted to enter a port number and IP address of the server to connect to. Enter the same port number as the server entered, and then the IP address of the server. From here, a GUI will present itself with further instructions to play the game.
The server must be started before the client can connect without error. One device can be both a client and server simultaneously. To test PiMafia on one device without a LAN, simply run “GameServer.py” once and “GameClient.py” repeatedly as multiple different processes, then enter 127.0.0.1 as the IP address of the server.
PiMafia works the same way as normal mafia, but with the server in charge. The first user (client) connected decides basic game rules, specifically the number of users, the number of mafia in the game, and the number of doctors in the game. After the specified number of users have connected, the server randomly assigns the roles of mafia and doctors to users. If a user is neither mafia or doctor, they are simply a villager. Users are not informed of the roles of any of the other users in the game. Then, turns begin until someone wins the game. At the start each turn, or “night,” one existing mafia and one existing doctor are picked at random and told to choose a user. Whoever the mafia picks is “killed,” or removed from the game, unless the doctor picks the same person, in which case they are “saved,” and kept in the game. Then, the “day” segment of the game begins, and the users are allowed to digitally message with each other for 30 seconds. After this discussion, the users each vote on a person to “hang,” or remove from the game. In the event of a tie, one of the tied users is chosen at random. Users removed from the game can spectate, but cannot be a part of the chat or vote. The game ends when either only mafia are left in the game (the mafia win) or only non-mafia are left in the game (villagers/doctors win).
The entirety of the PiMafia project is built in Python 3. Further, it implements a variety of specific libraries and functionalities of this programming language.
Multithreading allows a computer to create multiple different processes, or “threads,” to be run concurrently. This allows for increased efficiency and decreased runtime in a piece of code. However, it can often be more difficult to implement and present specific problems, such as deadlock. In this project, multithreading is achieved via the threading module, and is primarily used in two major ways. First, it allows the server to communicate with all of the different clients at the same time, by managing each client on a separate thread. Second, it allows reading of both input and output during inter-user discussion. For each user, one thread reads input to send to other users, while another receives input from other users to display.
The Berkeley Socket Interface, or BSD socket application programming interface (API), is an interface to allow inter-process network socket communication. This API is what allows the server and clients to communicate. The BSD socket API is handled by the native Python socket module for this project.
A simple graphical user interface is implemented to allow users to more easily interact with the system. The PySimpleGUI library is used to create this GUI. This did present some problems with multithreading, as the library only allows the GUI to be edited on the thread it was created. Thus, output during discussions is displayed not in the GUI, but in standard output.
Beyond a fun game that we can all enjoy, PiMafia is meant to be a marketable project and product. I aspire to use the Open Source Donation model used by famous projects such as Ubunutu, FireFox, and Wikipedia, where the software is free but users are motivated to donate. This will contibute the the overall online gaming market. The online gaming industry, valued at $78.61 billion dollars, contibutes greatly to the world economy, and provides many decent and well-paying jobs. Accordingly, this industry, and the PiMafia project, contibute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Decent Work and Economic Growth, providing “sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth” as well as “full and productive employment.”
Through this project, I have been able to learn about a few key areas of computing and programming in which I had little or no previous experience. The first area, and perhaps most important, is that of connecting multiple devices together in a network. Before this project, I had never worked with network programming before. Now, I feel confident in building complicated client-server structured systems in Python, and understand the basics of computer networks. Furthermore, learning about creating a LAN with a Raspberry Pi to connect to its desktop remotely, and then connecting the Pi to a WLAN to act as a server, I gained a greater understanding of how ports and IP addresses allow networks to function.
Another area of learning is that of multithreading. While I had some experience with multithreading in C#, here I really began to understand its practical applications, as well as its implementation in Python. Furthermore, while I previously had experience with only async, I now have a more base-level understanding of how threads are created and used, as I only used the basic threading library Python provides.
A final area of learning is less concerned with Python and more concerned with the Raspberry Pi itself. The Raspberry Pi presented a challenge in connecting to it, starting a remote desktop connection, etc. To practice, I figured out how to connect to the Raspberry Pi from Windows, OSX, and Linux (specifically Ubuntu). Now, I have a better understanding of how to connect and use a Raspberry Pi. Furthermore, as I needed to keep a rolling version of the same code on multiple different computers to test my project, I learned how to implement GitHub and Git Client utilities, specifically Sublime Merge. Learning to use Github and this software, I made it possible to easily have version control on multiple different devices running the same PiMafia software.