Re: Where are servers?

[Kjetil Torgrim Homme <kjetilho>]

The first important thing to consider is that crossfire doesn't have a
client. You can ask the server to let you in remotely, but once the
window is on your screen, the client will be terminated.

Second, UDP means you'll have to accept packet-loss. I don't think
crossfire is suited to this - you want to know if that beholder casts
an icestorm on you... You'll also have to accept that packets can
arrive out of order. In other words, if crossfire should use UDP, it
would basically have to re-implement TCP on top of it.

Keep in mind that XPilot actually uses more bandwidth now that it is
based on UDP, because there's redundancy in the packets so that it can
recover if some are lost.

There's no doubt, however, that crossfire needs to move away from the
dependency on the X-protocol, and I can think of some neat
optimisations an intelligent client enables us to do. Doing this will
be a lot of work, though. I think Crossfire will always be a fairly
network intensive game, and with current bandwidths, we may just as
well stick to our local networks where X will do the job for us.


Kjetil T.

PS. Oh yeah, Ackerendam (tentative name for the new base town) will be
somewhat bigger :-)