Network-Plugin

[mark]

Since the old network-plugin has been removed, what are plans for the next network-plugin?
Do you want to create it from scratch or do you want to use an external lib?

I played around with ptypes' networking classes and it is really easy to create a UDP or TCP-server and client (5 lines and you got it running).

See the docs/examples here:
http://www.melikyan.com/ptypes/

Because ptypes uses the zlib/libpng License and is plattform-independent, it should be no problem to make use of this lib (or of it's networking-code only).

What do you think?

[dingobloo]

Yes there has been talk about this on the mailing list, i'll search it later and see if i can find what it actually resulted in. Also, could i ask that you register in case we have too many "Guests" floating around.

[Keen]

Raknet http://www.rakkarsoft.com/ Seems very easy to use (I made a client server thing for a game in less than an afternoon). But ease of use doesn't mean its good. I'm not sure if it is or not, but it does sound good.

Another one I had heard of is SDL's networking. Not too sure about that one. I don't know where it is located. The SDL website is at http://www.libsdl.org.

[deckerego]

A new architecture was prototyped, but I haven't seen any new implementations. The idea was to have a common interface for UDP,TCP and IP messages, but this turned out to be fairly complex. UDP implementation was the big thing (to keep things low-latency), but it's not easy.

Really I think the key would be to start with a good UDP datagram layer and go from there. Kinda reiterating previous responses, I hear the SDL network layer is fairly good at that (many deathmatch games ported by Loki )

[intruder_xo]

Hello folks,

Well on that subject I would also like to get your opinions about the different Networking Libraries that are mentioned on the Crystal Space community web site.

They mention the following :

    *  VOS
    * HawkNL
    * Raknet
    * enet
    * SDL_net
    * Netlib
    * OpenTNL

I know VOS has been implemented on top of CS,  and OpenTNL is what has been used in Tribes, and some commercial games.

Thanks

[HangDude]

Well, i guess the big issue about UDP is that you can't guarantee that it's going to get there (does anybody know how many packages typically arrive on a free good adsl connection ?)

We could introduce a Message-based system where Messages can be either sent across reliable (TCP) or unreliable connection. Of course we would have to impose some limits when sending it unreliable (size of message) or introduce a flag in the message header that would tell it that next message contains data from the previous message etc.

I wouldn't go and try to reinvent TCP based on UDP, but just make sure that both can be transparently used. Something where you can deploy your messages and check to pick them up each frame or so. This would also have to include some multi-threading when waiting for messages (I'm not to familiar with asynchronous sockets, and guess they're not supported on non-win32 plattforms)..

Just my 2 cents!

Phil

[pinniped]

Anything happening with the network stuff?

RakNet works well - just spent the past 7 months removing bugs.  It will now run on OSX as well and it's even got its own package under FreeBSD.

Sure UDP is 'unreliable' but RakNet has a reliability layer to implement reliable UDP so you can send a reliable packet when you need to - no need to worry about your login or password packets vanishing.

HawkNL sucks and I have only said so about a million times...