Networking

[steve_d555]

I'm pretty sure that networking should be fairly easy with the new branch code. It should just be a matter of removing the ship move code and getting it from the server which uses the Game module to calculate all ships. We should also make a master server for which the individual servers could register and clients could connect to. When we do make a client (not the SDL part, more for the server list and connect to dialog) we should probably make it in a GUI toolkit like wxWindows (wxWidgets, sorry :o ) or GTK and then execute the game (SDL) from the GUI toolkit.
Sort of like this

GUI (wxWidgets?) --> Client (SDL) <--> Server --> Master Server
|-----------------------------------------------^


Something along those lines (I'm not a very good ascii drawer :D )

[rob]

I think the game needs to progress more and have a richer API for the networking module to call upon before we go into networking full blast.

What are your thoughts on this?

[steve_d555]

Almost definitely. Stuff like sending packets, recieving, packing them etc.. is a must for much easier programming down the road. But, I was thinking more along the lines of the future.

One question I do have is, do you think Ruby's UDP implementation is sufficient enough for what we will be doing?

[rob]

Probably. UDP is perfect for non critical transmissions, but the lower overhead offers faster transmission. Many online games use UDP packets.