Hello all,
I am trying to work out a network layout for a multiplayer gaming lan setup. That is easy, of course, when all players are connected to the same broadcast network segment, but doe to some design constraints in this case, I need to connect them between two routed subnets.
Although I have no trouble in setting that up, as I have some experience in that sort of thing, I also need to make sure that most of the common multiplayer lan games will work ok from the perspective of detecting other running games on the local network, as well as on the adjacent routed network.
This issue has led me to seek an understanding of how these games actually do detect what other games and game servers are operating in the immediate neighborhood.
My first thought is that they might simply check the local network IP address and just scan all other addresses on the local subnet until another host is detected that is running the game.
A possible alternative might be issuing some kind of specially formed broadcast packet to the local area network that is detected by other games running on neighboring hosts which then respond with some kind of ping reply.
So if I have a router with two ports - one port to each subnet with gaming stations - how can I make sure that computers on one subnet can detect games running on hosts attached to the other?
Please feel free to be technical - I have some understanding of network protocols and of software principles.
Thanks for reading!
Regards, Mike.
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Thanks for that jgordos.
OK, that is interesting, but it's the same problem in the end. as far as I can figure, broadcast of a udp packet will not go further than the local subnet - and routing has no real meaning in this context. So I guess that you are saying that I would need to put some kind of proxy broadcast on each router interfaces to retransmit to the second subnet?
Any ideas what mechanism might acheive that kind of thing?
Cheers.
I'm guessing you have already looked into matchmaking services, but I don't see other alternatives apart from VPN / hamachi to get them all onto the same segment.
A matchmaking service can be as simple as the host sending a 'game available' packet to a known server, then clients connect to the known server to revieve a list of available games. Once the host starts the game it sends a 'game closed' packet to the server. Advancements on this basic sturcture allow more information about game type, progress, player scores etc. to be passed to the server to aid the client in choosing an appropriate game as well as to keep global statistics.
There are a number of APIs available for matchmaking. The most well known would be GameSpy's toolkit (http://www.poweredbygames
I think if you solve the UDP packet problem, you're golden.
However, how are you going to do that?
Beats me. That's beyond my level of networking tech....
But hamachi as a gaming VPN for the machines would work fine... and would remove your need to do anything else.
That would be the route I'd take.
-john
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by: jgordosPosted on 2008-05-27 at 07:52:20ID: 21652320
You're thinking about the problem backwards...
Any host running on the net will "advertise" the game it's hosting by broadcasting the game info
A client, when started, knows to look for that advertisement.
This however is usually UDP... so you'll need to do some work to get it to be routable.
-john