SEIV Gold Demo does *not* have TCP/IP

LazarusLong42 · #1 January 25th, 2002, 01:40 AM

Or, you could always use the PBW RTC when 1) the gold disc comes out and 2) we get the server back up and running

Richard: you play Netrek? Wow... it has been a LONG time since I played that. Will have to check it out again...

Eric/LL

Richard · #2 January 25th, 2002, 03:33 AM

Yeah I go by Canute on most servers and Cold Pizza on my League Team.

I actually just picked it up about 6 months ago or so, I used to play a LONGGGGG time ago back in college back in 92-94.

dumbluck · #3 January 25th, 2002, 12:41 PM

What's "netrek"?

Richard · #4 January 25th, 2002, 04:41 PM

www.netrek.org

Taqwus · #5 January 25th, 2002, 05:39 PM

Netrek can get away with UDP because the consequences of packet loss (UDP being a connection-free, best-effort protocol) are relatively minor -- perhaps a player's ship gets blown up because his "shield up" packets got dropped, but he'll respawn with a new one, and he might have up to seven teammates who can bail him out, at least in an 8-on-8-style Bronco game. Otherwise, no biggie; it's not transferring files that get corrupted.

Heh. I used to play, in, what, '93-'95 or '96 or so. Never took it too seriously, and my dodging and torp marksmanship was pretty darned lousy.

robinleepowell · #6 January 25th, 2002, 07:21 PM

Just for the record, it turns out that SEIV Gold uses *both* UDP and TCP.

Judging by my dump logs, the client sends a UDP packet to say, "Yo, I'm here.". The server then responds with a similar packet.

Then you hit Begin Game on the host. The host sends a UDP packet, and then the *host* opens a TCP connection to a known port on the *client*.

This pretty much violates best practices of TCP/IP programming, and is just not a good idea.

Then the client creates their empire, and all the data transfer is done through TCP/IP.

At that point I stopped.

This is disturbingly bad networking code. I've been in contact with Aaron, whose response was "Open up the ports on your firewall.". Nevermind that when you're using UDP like this you can only have one host playing the game behind any given firewall, as long as the host is outside the firewall.

I'm rather annoyed, as this makes the game largely useless for my purposes. I specifically didn't get SEIV earlier because I wanted to play TCP/IP games during the day (i.e. from work; play a turn, work for an hour, play a turn, work for an hour, etc). Looks like it still isn't going to happen.

I know there's nothing you guys can do, but I wanted to vent.

-Robin, casting a long hard look at his pre-order.

geoschmo · #7 January 25th, 2002, 08:10 PM

Well, if you are only wanting to play a turn every hour or so, you don't really need TCP/IP at all. You could easily keep up that rate using PBW (Once we get it back up), or even standard PBEM. With only a small amount of playing with files. Very little actually if you use matryx's mod chooser to launch your turns.

Geoschmo