On Thursday, February 5, 2004, at 10:31 PM, Scott Rossi wrote:
All the routers I've owned allow you to assign one system on the network a
DMZ (demilitarized zone) address which I believe allows pretty much any
traffic in and out. Maybe this is what has to be set up by the game
players.
Other routers have ways to set up something similar (fixed NAT with open rules).
This has the advantage in that one computer behind each firewall can act as a game communications concentrator.
I find the idea of peer-to-peer communications very interesting. I think the firewall is one of the potential problems.
I had suggested the idea of a server or servers. If you want to preserve the notion of peer-to-peer, maybe the server is for facilitating communications only. And for setting up games among those looking for players. Once a game is created then the game server might then only facilitate game memo distribution and throttling denial-of-service.
The simplest way is to have all game instances go through the server in communication, but you might find some performance shortcuts to be used later.
One of the problems with going to port 80 is that some firewalls will force this to go through a proxy server and force the protocol to be http only. Many firewalls are set up to allow tcp going to other ports but only if originated from the LAN, that is, from inside.
The method least likely to cause trouble with firewalls might be to make bonafide http connections from inside to outside. If that has performance problems then eventually the game might try some other link to the server or try to make a direct connection and if those fail, drop down to http to a server.
I designed Revolution based communications system last year in which a server and many clients sent little messages to each other, but this peer-to-peer communications was facilitated by a star-shaped shell created by clients making tcp connections to the server, even through firewalls. So, even though communication was peer-to-peer at some level, the connection was client-server.
Dar Scott
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