Re: [Opentnl-general] Threadsafe?

[Mark F. <ma...@ga...>]

You'll need to explain a little more about the domain of your game, as 
there are several multithreading strategies you could use, depending on 
the type of game you have.

You could have one process control an area or "zone" - and have each 
zone process have its own NetInterface.  All communication server side 
between zones would be via TNL connections.  When a client crosses zone 
boundaries it connects to the server controlling that zone.

You could have one NetInterface control all client connections and 
object positioning information, and then have other threads for AI 
processing.  The AI threads would communicate with the network/physics 
thread through well defined synchronization points.

Simply fixing setMaskBits is not going to be enough to make TNL 
threadsafe -- there are many other concerns that would make it 
non-optimal to allow multiple threads to start mucking around with the 
network state.  Still, with a cleanly designed server application, 
there's no reason why TNL shouldn't work well in a 
multithreaded/multiprocess environment.

- Mark

boB Gage wrote:

> Huh...   Seems like that would be an important point to have somewhere 
> in the documentation so we would have known about this *before* 
> deciding on OpenTNL for our project.
>
> So, how exactly would you suggest I write a multi-threaded server 
> using OpenTNL???   The game we're developing is very server-intensive 
> (all decisions are made there) and producing this server as a single 
> thread application will never work for our MMORPG.
>
> boB
>
>> You are correct -- TNL is not thread safe.  Only one thread should ever
>> set mask bits on an object, etc...
>>
>>
>> We may look at making a threadsafe compile option.
>>
>>
>> - Mark
>
>
>
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