SEIV Gold Demo does *not* have TCP/IP

[robinleepowell]

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.