Re: [GD-Windows] Network code

[Ivan-Assen I. <iva...@gm...>]

> You may want to ping the enet mailing list for a better answer, but
> it's used for Cube (?), a popular FPS in Europe apparently, and I
> don't believe it runs into any significant issues with firewalls
> (well, no worse than anyone else is running into).

(Well, calling Cube popular is a bit of a overstatement - it's
reasonably complete fun and well-rounded for a open-source project,
but it's far from the popularity of the big commercial FPSes.)

But this is a side issue.

As most (all? all but the Dooms?) FPSes Cube is built on a
client/server model, which is inherently more forgiving with firewalls
- as long as the server is outside any firewalls, and with a real IP.

Our games are lockstep peer-to-peer, and fail when all peers are
behind firewalls. Our lobby code, which uses TCP, works OK, but once
the players click "Start" and the protocol switches to UDP, most
firewalls stop forwarding their packets. (We had the bad luck of
testing on our office firewall when developing it, which had the
strange habit of keeping open UDP ports briefly after the
corresponding TCP ports were used, and opened, so the games work with
it.)

E.g. Gamespy and Xbox Live offer all-peers-behind-firewalls
peer-to-peer networking, using a central server for the initial
handshake; a complete networking lib should include such functionality
IMHO (of course, leaving the very significant and non-trivial issue of
actually providing such a server to you).