SEIV Gold Demo does *not* have TCP/IP

[Taqwus]

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]

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]

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

[robinleepowell]

I don't have e-mail from the machine in question. 8)

Does PBW allow me to get around that?

-Robin

[geoschmo]

Yep. You can upload your turns directly to the PBW server through a web page interface. Then when everybody else does too the turn processes on the server and you can download the new turn directly from the server.

The only file handling would be unzipping it to the proper save game directory, and then uploading your .plr file after you play your turn.

RTC will automate that and you would have no file handling at all, but you may have firewall issues with that as well. I can't use RTC from work.

Geoschmo

[robinleepowell]

RTC?

[Richard]

The ports are documented though if you only want to open up specific ports, BTW.

[robinleepowell]

Doesn't help if:

1. You don't control the firewall.

2. You have more than one player behind the firewall (you can only forward UDP to one machine, because it's connectionless).

3. You have an inexpensive firewall that can't handle letting through UDP (some firewalls block UDP inbound for security reasons).

4. Your ISP blocks UDP (which some do for security reasons).

And regardless, there's no reason to use it at all.

-Robin

[geoschmo]

RTC, PBW Real Time Client. It's a java program we have been testing for a while, but were are going to make available to everyone with the Gold release.

It interfaces with the PBW server and handles all the file transfer stuff/auto launches your game turn. Allows you to just log in and play the turns.

You have to have the java Runtime-environment on your machine to work, but you can get that free from sun. Shrapnel was going to put it on the gold CD as well if there was room so people don't have to download it.

And it runs on port 5190. So if your firewall blocks that you can't use it.

Geoschmo

[robinleepowell]

Ooh, very cool.

My firewall allows arbitrary outbound TCP/IP connections on high (>1023) ports. Most firewalls do. Then the allow the return packets, once the outbound connection has been made. This is how things are supposed to work.

-Robin