[OLPC-Games] [pygame] Re: PyQNet project on Launchpad

[Noah Kantrowitz]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: games-bounces at lists.laptop.org [mailto:games-
> bounces at lists.laptop.org] On Behalf Of joe at jotaro.com
> Sent: Monday, July 28, 2008 4:12 PM
> To: Games for the OLPC
> Subject: Re: [OLPC-Games] [pygame] Re: PyQNet project on Launchpad
> 
> > As it stands there is no real reason to use UDP for games anymore
> > unless you really think the vast majority of your users will be on
> bad
> > connections. I don't think this is the case, even for OLPC (sat links
> are
> > slow, but generally not lossy).
> >
> > --Noah
> 
> As I recall from a few connection-related bug reports and mailing lists
> I've read, the mesh can actually be quite lossy, especially when you
> get a
> classroom of 30-40 laptops together -- as described in the comments of
> this ticket, for example:
> 
> http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/6463

Even if that is the case, handling sequencing et al in Python just makes it
slower, you can't magically pull reliability out of your hat. You can just
detect the issue somewhat sooner. I would say a network timeout with TCP
does the job just as well. The only possible argument I could see is if you
could move into a degraded networking mode as packets get lost, where you
send less and less data until you hit a point that works. Designing anything
in this manner (let alone a game) would be very difficult.

--Noah