[TS] A unmentioned multiplayer patch

[Revolutionary]

On my browsing of the internet i came across this patch which i have never seen mentioned any where else

http://ts.sesse.net/

 

As you may or may not know we are running out of IPv4 Adresses and sonner or latter we are going to have to change to IPv6, many modern games never mind old are still being shipped with no IPv6 support which could potentialy be very costly mistake.

 

I was supprised this patch for Tiberian Sun which could quite easily extend its life for years to come was never mentioned.

 

I posted this here since i thought it was relevent and hopefuly it may benifit Our projects like CnCNet.

[pichorra]

IPv4 is firmly alive... IPv6 is in borning status... and IPX is dying. I think it was a bit of waste of time, since, i think the IPv4 don't seens to be killed in the most newers OS. but, with the Dying of Windows XP, everything what is old can die too...

[Revolutionary]

There isnt enough IPv4 adresses any more, the estimates are in the next year we will run out leading to the forced adoption of IPv6 (since 5 was skipped), IPv4 is unlikely to be killed as such but we need to move forward unless we wish to be faced with a shortage of adresses, when we hit the limit it simply means no new device will be able to connect to the internet.

(Think of how any computers there are, how many smart phones, servers, games platforms, internet based TV's all the time more are being created, bought and used And all need an IP adress)

 

Edit: have a look at this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion

[Irony]

Yeah, !P4 is dead.

 

We're gonna run out of addresses this month. and then it's estimated about a year until all of the reserved addresses are allocated. 2011 is the year of IPv6.

 

What'll probably happen though is private networks will remain IPv4 and the router will connect to the IPv6 namespace. But a lot of programs are gonna need updates to function properly.

 

 

and IPX?! IPX has been dead for a decade!

[pichorra]

my post is obsolete by one decade!

[Myg]

About a year ago I brought this topic up with a few people. It is something worth keeping in mind. It shouldn't be too hard (in my opinion and theory) to fix up C&C95 or other games since the ipv6 addressing protocol uses a similar struct for storing the endpoint/info. Concerning cncnet itself, since we have greater access and control of the system since hifi reprogrammed the dlls we should be in a position to deal with it when the time comes.

[Irony]

tbh, I've written a couple of networked apps recently, and at least in c# & android java it's trivial to switch to IP6. Though I didn't simulcast, I just added a switch in the menu to use ip4 or ip6, so running both at the same time might require a little more, but I've not looked into it.

[Myg]

Checked out MSDN, according to them; its replacing the addr struct with a new larger structure for the IPv6 and when you are writing new or updating old (with source) they suggest to add another socket to the system to provide IPv4 + IPv6 simultaneous functionality.

 

So it seems it is as "trivial" as Irony says, my only concern is that of the internals of the game actually sorting the IP Address somewhere outside of its native struct (which would require some hacking to the likes of Nyerguds)

[Nyerguds]

Well, I personally never debugged multiplayer to the point of actually seeing that list of player IP addresses... but I guess I could look into that if I got some time.

[hifi]

So it seems it is as "trivial" as Irony says, my only concern is that of the internals of the game actually sorting the IP Address somewhere outside of its native struct (which would require some hacking to the likes of Nyerguds)

 

The game does not need to know a real ip, just some unique 6 byte "IPX" identifier and the dll can do the rest (mapping a unique identifier to a real IPv6 address).

 

We did talk about IPv6 with Myg. I think it's still too early to think about it. It is trivial enough to support v6, just not trivial to support both simultaneously unless we use a relay server.