[GNE]GNE Update

[Gillius <gi...@ma...>]

Work continues on the CVS version of GNE.  The exciting 0.5 release 
containing the completed mid-level API I believe is just a couple of weeks 
away!  At this time GNE will be "complete" from the basic aspect of data 
communications between peers.  After this is completed, the game engine, 
high-level classes will be started.  (Your testing, help, and ANY 
suggestions will all be VERY appreciated in this process!)

Anyways, I've been doing quite a bit of work moving towards this goal.
As you already know, the GNE protocol spec was released quite some time 
ago, and I am working on implementing that spec.

So far, I have implemented the handshake part of the spec, and tonight I 
have just finished the ExitPacket functionality for a graceful disconnect 
and this is now in the CVS.  It is ironic how it was easier for me to code 
GNE to work properly when the connection FAILED -- it was actually harder 
to get the proper behavior for an ideal disconnect ;).  Well sorta.  Turned 
out I found a way to solve it very easily but I had to think about it for 
awhile ;).

Development would have gone faster but I have spent quite a bit of time 
doing some more serious testing of GNE in preparation of 0.5 and the rest 
of the protocol implementation.  I have been running stress tests and such 
to make sure that GNE is operating top-notch, and in this process I have 
found plenty of bugs, and luckily I have discovered and corrected some VERY 
obscure bugs that I would only have (likely) found in the raw pre-protocol 
implementation code, so I've been making a point to test hard throughout 
this whole process.

Just tonight I decided to go wild, and I started 6 exhello clients on my 
machine hammering as hard as they could on a server process on my machine.  
I had them in a loop to connect as fast as possible 100 times over.  To my 
delight, thanks to the blocking nature of GNE (and the much improved 
Windows XP kernel), I didn't see any noticeable performance degredation at 
all.

Although, because threading issues are very sensitive to processor speeds 
and operating systems, I encourage anyone willing to keep up to date with 
the latest CVS when possible and make sure that the examples are always 
running properly for them, and to report any errors on the gnelib-users 
list or to me personally.  I espically want to hear bug reports about how 
you feel that API might be weak, hard to understand, or that the 
documentation is deficient, because it will be pointless for me to make a 
library that no one can use.

For those of you curious, here is the complete, boring list of changes thus 
far since 0.45:
GNE 0.45 to current
  Graceful disconnects are now detected and handled through the onExit 
event.
  ExitPackets are now sent when a connection closes, as per the GNE 
protocol
    specification.
  Created and implemented the ExitPacket class.
  Fixed an event syncronization bug in SyncConnection that caused an assert
    to fail in onDisconnect.
  Now if a listener for a Connection is NULL the event thread is halted
    until a listener is set.  Before, it was an error to have a NULL 
listener
    but now you can set a NULL listener to temporarily hold events.
  Fixed an acquire/release bug in exsynchello's usage of gout.
  Fixed thread-related bug in ServerConnection dtor.
  Implemented PacketStream::waitToSendAll and added timeout option.
  Fixed a bug in ConnectionEventGenerator where it can try to start an 
event
    on a listener that was just unregistered, and this would cause an 
access
    violation as unregistration invalidates the iterator.
  Fixed a bug where a deadlock was likely to occur when a write failed.
  exrawtest updated to test endianness of the RawPacket.
  Due to a new feature in HawkNL, GNE now sends all data in little endian
    format which is consistant with the GNE protocol spec.
  Added Time::toString and the ability to output it to an ostream.
  New example exping to show and test PingPacket.
  Added ID attribute to every GNE Packet class.
  A new class PingPacket to handle pinging.
  Removed the timestamp value from the Packet class.  That should have been
    removed long ago.  Another packet will eventually be created that
    supports timestamps.
  A mutex was no longer needed in Connection and was causing deadlocks, so 
it
    was removed.  The mutex was left over from the old event system before 
it
    was rewritten.
  Handshaking as specified in the GNE protocol specs is now implemented.
  When an unreliable connection does not exist, packets marked as being 
sent
    over the unreliable packet stream are sent over the reliable stream
    instead.
  Added adjustCount function in the Counter class.
  RawPacket class updated to use the GNE protocol data types.  Nulls are 
now
    allowed in the middle of strings.  Max string size is 255 bytes.
  RawPacket example updated to better test new GNE protocol requirements.
  More work on exnetperf to handle more clients and better format the data.
  Added the LockMutex class as a convenience.  It locks a mutex on creation
    and unlocks it on deletion which is useful for use in functions with 
many
    exit points, or functions that throw exceptions.
  Fixed a bug with an assert being outside of a guarded section and 
actually
    causing errors it was supposed to fix.

Gillius