Earlier in the chapter, we talked about the architecture of a multiplayer game that was based on the client-server pattern. Since this is the approach we will take for the games that we'll be developing throughout the book, let us define some of the main roles that the game client will fulfill.

From a higher level, a game client will be the interface between the human player and the rest of the game universe (which includes the game server and other human players who are connected to it). Thus, the game client will be in charge of taking input from the player, communicating this to the server, receive any further instructions and information from the server, and then render the final output to the human player again. Depending on the type of game server used (we'll discuss this in the next section and in future chapters), the client can be more sophisticated than just an input application that renders static data received from the server. For example, the client could very well simulate what the game server will do and present the result of this simulation to the user while the server performs the real calculations and tells the results to the client. The biggest selling point of this technique is that the game would seem a lot more dynamic and real-time to the user since the client responds to input almost instantly.