Microsoft DirectPlay instead of UDP

[Johan]

Originally posted by JohnMK
What I really want to know is will there in the future be support for UDP in Eu2? I love this game, and it breaks my heart that it's so difficult for me to play it with people off campus.

No, there never will be. As UDP is not guaranteed delivery, and we dont have the resourcces to write a complete network API.

 

[Johan]

Re: Re: Re: Microsoft DirectPlay instead of UDP

Originally posted by Waffen
Umm... I could probably give you this..

I have several. The only one I have which I could legally give you is one I wrote myself when WinSock 2 first came out. It is tested and has been used successfully.

It impliments UDP and TCP, but more importantly it has RUDP (Reliable UDP) which basically is a faster (non-linear) TCP. It's built over WinSock 2, so works on all flavors of Windows. It uses UDP headers plus a few bytes so is a far cry smaller than the 42 byte TCP header. It can be configured to guarentee delivery order (or not) but doesn't force a resend of more recent packets upon failure like TCP does, so you'll experience a huge speed increase on any connection which has a loss rate of over 1% or so.

I have no idea how easy it would be to impliment in your case, because it's been a while since I did any DirectPlay programming and have since burned the API out of my memory. General use is to open 2 com handles with each client (one UDP, one RUDP). These actually share two UDP sockets (one for broadcast and one for listening), but the internal stuff shouldn't really concern a user. You basically just write and read to each handle (either via a "stream" or atomic packets), so it's pretty simple.

Anyway.. I expect you have more important things you're working on, but I figured I'd mention it.

Sounds neat, the thing we use directplay for has been the management of games, organisation of players in the games, and packets sending to them.