Would like assistance vetting MMF2d against idea

[Corentin]

For this kind of parsing problems, always put user input at the end of the sent string, and then use mid() to retrieve this input.

For example a private message:
/pm,Blizna,Hi, how are you ?

this solves your problem as long as you only have one user-input.

[Glenshadow]

Corentin,

I'm unfamiliar with mid(), but I will definately be checking the docs for it tonight when I get home from work.

Can you elaborate a bit on why it will only work with 'one user input' and what you mean specifically by 'one user input'?

[Glenshadow]

hhhmmm... My initial tests with 'blast' for mooclick aren't very encouraging.

The UDP packet is being delivered less than half the time even when on the same local network (the same machine even!).

Now UDP, by nature, isn't designed for gauranteed delivery... But less than 50% on lan or even the same computer is pretty excrutiatingly bad perfomance.

It should be a waaay higher delivery percentage on a local LAN.

I can only hope maybe somehow I'm at fault and haven't yet figured out the 'right way' to do it... But my tests are pretty bare bones and I don't see much room for user error.

[Glenshadow]

Oh, almost forgot, I tested TCP as well and it was spot on 100%.

I will do some more testing tonight before I make any judgements on the UDP, but as per the above, it isn't looking good so far.

[Blizna]

I think there were mentioned that UDP doesnt work properly on the same machine.

I dont know it-never use UDP, just read it here many times.

[Glenshadow]

That's a good point Bliza, in order to give this a fairer test I'll need to use 2 seperate machines on the same LAN. My tests so far have been on the same machine (and now that I think about it, it's a miracle it worked at all).

Luckily I have a home network with several PCs jacked into it that will make an excellent testing ground (I'm at work right now, not the best environment to test in).

[Dynasoft]

If you have bad UDP reliability on a local network, you should try running a UDP testing tool, it may be that you have a bad network cable and half the packets get corrupted. TCP is guaranteed, so if a packet is corrupted it just gets resent, which just results in a several millisecond delay. I was always having trouble with a turn-based network multiplayer game (space empires 4 specifically) because it used UDP and didn't have anything in place to handle packets not arriving, so it would freeze up sometimes between turns. It turned out to be my network cable that was killing the packets, but the game should never have relied on UDP in the first place. It seems quite a few professional developers use UDP as "drop packets if congested" or "faster than TCP" without realising that it's actually "non-guaranteed delivery". IIRC UDP packets aren't guaranteed to even arrive in the same order they were sent, which causes the random "jump back" effect in some older multiplayer games.

[Random]

Yeah, all UDP packets need to be timestamped to avoid odd effects.

The type of server i was refering to is one i can hardly explain, its the type of model they use for FPS games and many EA games released today. Its much more organised and can handel much more players and data. It has todo with serverside packing/filtering data and also very important is that the clients control the server instead of having instances running at client side. [..] Sush a server can only be made in MMF2 and is thus a Win32 application.

I really don't know what sort of server model you are referring to. A "dedicated server" maybe? But honestly I cannot think of a "kind of server that can only be made in MMF2". Does EA need MMF2 to write their kinds of servers? I can imagine that for some cases it can be more work to achieve certain things - e.g. if you want accurate collision detection, serverside etc. but in the long run an MMF2 server will just fail, performance-wise, including the fact that it happily consumes all computer resources while doing so.

Making an organized AND efficient server with MMF is almost impossible from how I see it. Despite that, any other programming language is better for "packing/filtering data" too. MMF2 excels at making 2d clients. But I really recommend against creating a server with it. I wanted to create an avatar-chat once, and the MMF server couldn't keep up with it, leaving me to recode everything from scratch (besides, writing the server in a non-MMF language took 10 times less time too).