play pong online, entirely within your terminal.
a server and terminal client implementation of pong, built entirely in rust. client and server communicate over raw tcp using an extremely compact custom protocol (most messages are one or two bytes in length).
to play a game of pong, the client can be downloaded from this repository's releases or ran with cargo.
the below commands are shown using cargo.
if instead you've downloaded a release binary, just omit the cargo run --bin prefix and replace client with the path to the binary on your filesystem.
to start a new game:
$ cargo run --bin client new
this will print a lobby id to the screen that can be used by another user to join the game.
to join an existing game:
$ cargo run --bin client join <LOBBY_ID>
by default, the client is configured to connect to my server.
if you are running your own pong server that you want the client to connect to, set PONG_SERVER_ADDR on your environment with the format [IPv4]:[PORT] (e.g. 0.0.0.0:8080) before running the client binary.