--On Friday, November 18, 2005 3:38 PM -0500 "Deacon @[dgx]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Now, P2P would be a possibiliity. That scales. One central server does not. Kudos on that idea. So, if that were possible, how do we get "Steam Torrent" going?
The protocol for BitTorrent is out there. Blizzard uses it for WoW updates. The big drawback is that it's not NAT-friendly, because the client must also be a server listening on multiple ports. (Which reminds me, I need to ask on the BT list why it needs more than one listen port.) Historically BT has needed a "tracker" which stays informed of what clients exist in the swarm. A new client registers with the tracker and the tracker adds it to the list of clients participating for that file. All other traffic is client-to-client (ie. peer-to-peer). There are some tracker-less extensions to the latest BT protocol, but I don't know the details. For this application, the game server can act as a tracker to its clients, and a Steam master server could act as a meta-tracker, using the game servers to funnel and reduce tracker traffic. _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
