Internet Multiplayer?

[orbitaldecay]

Are there any plans to implement any network multiplayer features in any upcoming releases of mupen?

[Tillin9]

Its on the todo list, but currently not a priority. Netplay won't be in 1.4 (which should be coming soon) and probably not in 1.5 either. Sorry.

[orbitaldecay]

No apologies necessary, I'm a programmer and I was considering tinkering with it myself, I was just wondering if anyone else already had the idea in the works.

[Tillin9]

Well then, let me be the first to say welcome aboard. As far as dev. progress on netplay, Okaygo had been responsible for the Mupen64k netplay build using kaillera. Sadly he lost the source and open kaillera does not seem to have a bright future due to license issues with the new kaillera owner.

To that end, it was suggested we pick another cross-platform netplay library. I wasn't aware of any, but Slougi knew of a few and gave me some links in IRC. Since I'm not a networking expert, nor really in a position to test which was better, I decided to focus my efforts elsewhere.

I'd suggest you help with the porting efforts since if we have a single codebase building and working (to some degree) on all three major platforms (Linux, Win32, and OSX) we'd be in a better situation to evaluate and implement netplay.

[orbitaldecay]

Yes, I've been looking over the source from the svn and I was thinking SDL_net might be a nice choice being as that mupen already uses SDL for input and video

[nmn]

To be honest, SDL_Net is actually a pretty bad networking library - Using Win32 and POSIX sockets seperately may be better, because they are very alike. Nonetheless, SDL_Net does have everything we need (I think) so it can be done.

[DarkJezter]

SDL_Net is actually a pretty bad networking library

Any idea what issues exist with SDL_Net?

[orbitaldecay]

Yeah, win32 and posix sockets aren't difficult to port between either, the function names are mostly the same. What issues with SDL_net have you experienced and/or heard of?

[Tillin9]

The only objection I have towards SDL_net is its low-level, but so is posix sockets (and win32 is basically the same since MS took that from BSD). I actally think SDL_net is a good cross-platform library as that's what Blizzard uses.

However, ideally we wouldn't have to re-invent the wheel and could use a higher level library that could handle some of the synchronization issues with actual gameplay and some of the lobby functions necessary to find and initiate multiplayer itself.

[okaygo]

I can help with the multiplayer aspect

Things to remember:

Key data must be sent everytime there is an interrupt to query keydata.

Other than that, the games should sync.