[ENet-discuss] Removing Channels and Reliable Ordering

[Lee Salzman]

Channel 255 is where connection related commands (like ping, connect,
disconnect, throttle configure, etc.) are sent. That way it doesn't
mess with the sequencing on other channels.

Now, if you're not using channels or reliable packets, it might be
easier to not use ENet and just use plain UDP, but then again, there's
still a lot of value ENet adds even in that situation. YMMV.

But in any case, there shouldn't be any need to modify ENet - just 
specify 1 channel per connection and don't send any reliable packets,
and you won't suffer any overhead from either of them. The sequencing 
of unreliable packets imposes no speed hit whatsoever, since packets
that would have to be delivered out-of-order are simply discarded.

So, in short:
1) Don't modify ENet! It's not necessary!
2) Allocate only 1 channel per client.
3) Send your packets as unreliable.

Lee

On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 10:10:55AM -0000, Jim Purbrick wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> First of all, thanks for ENet! It does 90% of what I want and has been
> really easy to integrate with the system I'm working on.
> 
> The first major modification I'm trying to make to ENet is to remove
> channels and reliable ordering. I'm using the sufficient causal ording
> mechanisms used on PARADE and MASSIVE-3 to avoid stalling on missing
> reliable messages, so don't need multiple channels and don't want any
> reliable message stalling.
> 
> I've changed the channel array in ENetPeer to be a single channel by value
> and have trivially replaced the code that finds the correct channel in a
> peer. However, I've noticed that the peer itself also contains sequence
> number variables that are used when a special ChannelID of 0xFF is
> specified. Can anyone shed some light on what is happening here? Are these
> variables redundant when no channels are used? What are they used for? Am I
> going to still need a special ChannelID flag in the data structures even
> when the channels are removed?
> 
> The other question I have is how to go about removing the stalling of
> reliable messages. I'd like all messages to be delivered to the application
> as soon as they have been re-assembled.
> 
> Thanks for your help and thanks for ENet!
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Jim.
> _______________________________________________
> ENet-discuss mailing list
> ENet-discuss at cubik.org
> http://lists.cubik.org/mailman/listinfo/enet-discuss