Pyro-Web, Anton's Tempory Insanity pages

These Functions are useful for anyone who wants to write a internet multi-user, fast reaction game (platformers, Quake clones etc), that by their nature must have small communication delays (lags). These routines are for communicating information between machines connected through the Internet. These programs differ from Paul Burkey's TCP examples in that they use the UDP internet protocol instead of TCP for speed (TCP is ok for strategy or turn based games as a slight lag is acceptable with them). UDP is much faster, but unlike TCP there is no guarantee that your data packet will get to it's destination (UDP is about 90% reliable); so you have to write your communication code with this in mind. These routines use Peer-to-Peer comunications rather than Server-Client (although the latter is used for Login, and will be used for system messages like disconnecting).
You don't need a internet connection to run these programs, as you can run multiple copies on the same machine, because the TCP/IP protocol works the same, wether communicating on the same machine or to the other side of the world!
For details on how to put these Functions into your game see here. I suggest you read all these docs first, as these Funcs do most of the work for you, but you still going to have to do some hard work yourself.
I've originally written these Functions for use in my own game Pyro-Mid, but I haven't had time to do anything on it for awhile now, as I've been too busy programming these Functions. But a couple of other people are going to use them in their games, so I'm involved in game creation anyway. :) One game is Lifter by Chris Deeney. We've done some testing over the internet (from New Zealand to the UK) with it, and all the routines run excellently, and have the same lag as the `Ping' command does (which is as fast as you can get!). We have a few small problems to nut out, but that won't be a problem.

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Questions/Comments to:- Anton Reinauer- ants@paradise.net.nz

(c) 1999 Anton Reinauer - Last updated 1-1-2000