SEIV Gold Demo does *not* have TCP/IP

[robinleepowell]

No, wait, before you flame.

I'm serious.

It uses UDP/IP.

This is *not* the same thing. In particular, pretty much every firewall on the planet can handle NATed connections using TCP/IP.

Pretty much none of them can handle UDP without special configuration. Usually not even then.

Using UDP only makes sense when speed is of the essence, and even then is a pretty bad idea.

I was unable to play with a friend of mine until he completely removed his firewall (a low-end linksys router), even though he had told it to forward all incoming traffic to his machine (it wouldn't let UDP out).

So, as TCP/IP play is really important to me (I don't have e-mail accounts on the machines I play SEIV from; I using linux for e-mail), I would really like to know why the SEIV Gold demo doesn't have it, and when this is likely to be fixed.

Thank you.

-Robin

[Suicide Junkie]

That is something to send to Malfador directly.
(Send to: info@malfador.com)

[robinleepowell]

Will do, thanks.

-Robin

[geoschmo]

While I do agree that it would be nice if it were easier/possible to play through a firewall, our experience with testing it on the beta team showed that speed was very much an issue.

With several players (I think we had as many as five in one game), if any players are on dialups it can take a long time to get the files to eveyone. Especially if the host is on a dialup modem

This is an area I have very little expertise in, but if changing it to make it more accesable through firewalls is going to slow it down even more, ugh.

Geoschmo

[robinleepowell]

Actually, UDP is *worse* for transfer of anything larger than the size of a single packet (generally <1KB).

Substantially worse, actually. If SEIV Gold is using UDP for the actual turn transfers (which I didn't test), it would probably get rather a lot faster with TCP/IP. *Especially* over dialup.

The only advantages to UDP are that individual packets get there faster (at the cost of losing many of them) and it's easier to program.

-Robin

[geoschmo]

Well, if that's the case, by all means please suggest it to Aaron. Anything that would speed it up I am all for.

Geoschmo