More Frodo/Wii networking news[29 Mar 2009|03:51pm]
I´ve had a cold this weekend and basically stayed at home not doing much. That generally sucks, but thankfully the sky has been uniformly gray apart from occasional snow and rain. Anyway, it fortunately leaves some time over for hacking. So I´ve been finishing up and testing the Frodo/Wii networking support. To get everything working well, I´ve done a number of changes:
Package drops are a problem and are typically seen as graphics glitches. I´ve therefore implemented a refresh which constantly sweeps from bottom right to top left and redraws blocks. To avoid congestion, this is only done when bandwidth allows (simply pauses if there is too much traffic).

To detect when peers disconnect, I now periodically ping peers from the broker. If they don´t reply, they are removed from the connection lists

poll is now used instead of select on the wii

I´ve registered the c64-network.game-host.org domain at dyndns and started a broker there

Plus a lot of small fixes here and there

I´ve also verified that the UDP hole punching process actually work - through playing Bubble Bobble with Linda in Karlskrona. I´ve also tested connections with people in north america, but the latency is really too high for good gameplay at those distances (and it also seems like input packets are dropped, which makes things difficult).

This should come as good news anyhow, and for daring people that want to test, I´ve built a "release candidate" binary here.