[ENet-discuss] Limiting the channels

[Jay Sprenkle]

ENet does allocate some additional storage for each channel. I don't believe
it's a lot though (depending on your definition of 'a lot'). I think you
only really need the one channel.

The value of channels for me was you could have higher priority traffic
routed through a specific channel and any further structure I imposed on the
data being sent was handled outside the networking library.


On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 6:32 AM, M. Rijks <enet at forge.dds.nl> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Apologies for the slightly long precursor, but I feel I need to make the
> issue clear.
>
> I am in the process of designing a networking library for a particular game
> development system, and I am using ENet as the underlying 'protocol'. The
> things I am building on top of it is a transparent and easy-to-use
> interface, player management, session management and all that jazz. I also
> wish to set up ENet-driven lobby server software which can host any game
> that uses this library, as well as instructing hosts to punch holes for
> connecting players.
>
> The goal is that the interface for connecting to a game is about as simple
> as it was with DirectPlay: the end user / game developer need only one IP
> address and optionally port number to connect to. The remote end can either
> be a server for the game (the session) or it can be a lobby server. The
> communication is entirely the same: a list of sessions can be received (just
> one with a game server, many with a lobby server) and a session can be
> joined (immediately when connected with a game server; automatically
> connecting to the game server if the connection was a lobby server). Both
> the end user and the game developer should be oblivious to how this happens,
> as reconnections are handled by the library.
>
> I'm quite confident with the architecture I have set up, but I do have an
> issue: It is up to the game developer to decide how many channels should be
> opened for the game. And as far as I understood Enet, it is the client that
> tells the host how many channels it wants to open. That's fine if clients
> directly connect to a game server, but not when a client connects to the
> lobby server. The lobby server doesn't need more than a single (guaranteed
> delivery) channel for its purposes, but clients may instruct it to open up
> to 255 channels. And since lobby servers can potentially service hundreds,
> even thousands of clients, I assume that they will reserve a lot of
> unnecessary resources.
>
> Is my understanding of channel allocation between client and host correct?
> If so, is there any way to limit the number of channels used by a host? And
> if so, what will happen if a badly written game sends data on a channel that
> the lobby doesn't have?
>
> Thanks in advance for any response!
>
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>



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