C++ for Rockstar Games' Social Club?

[pacific123]

Hello there. I have a question regarding a certain job.

If you look at the following link:

http://www.rockstargames.com/careers/position/3bd063db/rockstar-nyc

You'll find a job posted by Rockstar (the makers of Grand Theft Auto) asking for a programmer(s). Specifically, they're asking for work to be done with Social Club. (Basically for those who don't know, it's Rockstar's DRM. They put code in all of their games so that your achievements can be tracked and compared with other players.)

The job says some responsibilities will be:
-Becoming familiar with code, both in-game and in our services, to provide support to the game projects.
-Maintain, support and optimize code in Social Club and help develop new services and systems as games and features are developed.

My question is, what type of C++ coding will you be doing to support something like Social Club?

I understand how a game can be build with a game engine, and then I can see how a game may be connected to databases/servers so information can be accessed on websites or in game matching players up or displaying scoreboards, but is that really even optimal in C++?

If anyone can guess what the position would actually be doing (that makes sense in this context), please explain it? And possibly direct me to some literature or throw me some keywords of things I could study (not saying I want the job, I'm just curious).

Thank you if you can help, and thanks for reading.

[heepoo]

i think it uses UDP port to connect to servers, because most games and applications use UDP ports to send the data between the client and the server

[Z e r e o]

heepoo wrote:

i think it uses UDP port to connect to servers, because most games and applications use UDP ports to send the data between the client and the server

In this case I would highly doubt it using bare bones UDP sockets since it is dealing with information that needs to be reliable (Achievements, top scores, social aspects, etc.) so more then likely it isn't using bare bones UDP (By bare bones I mean straight UDP without any reliability layers on top of it).

As for what kind of work you will be doing. I would say it would be very networking heavy and very data processing heavy. You are going to be probably be doing with latency issues, authentication/ownership, matchmaking, optimizing databases and queries, maybe even some cheat protection. Though I couldn't really say and am really just guessing on the limited information I have. Though it sort of sounds like Steam's achievements software so maybe a good start would be to dig into that and what it does https://partner.steamgames.com/documentation/api . Also if you happen to have a copy of the Unreal Engine 4 source code check out their Steam API features also. Also all the topics I listed above would be a plus to at least know the basics in.

- Networking Architecture / Basics in networking.
- Latency Management would be a nice thing to know (Though not sure if you would be dealing with it)
- How matchmaking works in games and the challenges involved.
- Database management/Optimizations (This is a big one)
- Voice over IP would be nice to know about also.
- Anti-cheat measures.

Those would be the main ones I would concentrate on for now if Social Club is indeed like the Steam API. Though be warned each and every one of those is a very deep and entire books have been written on each of those subjects. So it might be best to learn the basics of most and specialize in the one(s) that interest you most.

If you are looking for some specific articles/literature don't have the time at the moment to post any but will try and post some good stuff on any subjects you might be interested in. Anyways hopefully that helps a bit.