Hi all,
Apologies for the slightly long precursor, but I feel I need to make
the issue clear.
I am in the process of designing a networking library for a particular
game development system, and I am using ENet as the underlying
'protocol'. The things I am building on top of it is a transparent and
easy-to-use interface, player management, session management and all
that jazz. I also wish to set up ENet-driven lobby server software
which can host any game that uses this library, as well as instructing
hosts to punch holes for connecting players.
The goal is that the interface for connecting to a game is about as
simple as it was with DirectPlay: the end user / game developer need
only one IP address and optionally port number to connect to. The
remote end can either be a server for the game (the session) or it can
be a lobby server. The communication is entirely the same: a list of
sessions can be received (just one with a game server, many with a
lobby server) and a session can be joined (immediately when connected
with a game server; automatically connecting to the game server if the
connection was a lobby server). Both the end user and the game
developer should be oblivious to how this happens, as reconnections
are handled by the library.
I'm quite confident with the architecture I have set up, but I do have
an issue: It is up to the game developer to decide how many channels
should be opened for the game. And as far as I understood Enet, it is
the client that tells the host how many channels it wants to open.
That's fine if clients directly connect to a game server, but not when
a client connects to the lobby server. The lobby server doesn't need
more than a single (guaranteed delivery) channel for its purposes, but
clients may instruct it to open up to 255 channels. And since lobby
servers can potentially service hundreds, even thousands of clients, I
assume that they will reserve a lot of unnecessary resources.
Is my understanding of channel allocation between client and host
correct? If so, is there any way to limit the number of channels used
by a host? And if so, what will happen if a badly written game sends
data on a channel that the lobby doesn't have?
Thanks in advance for any response!
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