Flash in the Darkstar

Networking & Multiplayer
#1

I am looking to use the Darkstar project in conjunction with a Flash client.

I would like to check the feasibility of porting the Client API across to Actionscript 3.0 / Flash 9.0. Has anybody out there attempted such a thing already? Can anyone forsee any difficulties in making this work in practice?

The second part relates to UDP v TCP. Given that I am attempting to write a browser based multiplay game, it is important that the game can be enjoyed by lazy office workers behind firewalls. The game will be very latency tollerant which means that I would prefer to use TCP. Is this feasible with the darkstar framework? I imagine it communicates using UDP but have seen no documentation either way.

#2

Okay. A couple of answers here:

First, on FLASH. It is unlikely the Darkstar team inside of Sun will do a Flash client API. We just don’t have the expertise or bandwidth. We are however hoping this is something the community does after we do the open source release. The client API is thin and easily ported and the default protocol is designed to go easily to any OS or language.

Which gets me into the second answer. The API supports specifying reliable/unreliable and ordered/unordered channels. The default protocol implements anything requiring ordering or reliability as TCP and the other combinations as UDP. However, this is just the default protocol. Darkstar supports pluggable protocols on a per-app basis and if you write your own protocol handler you can communicate any way you want. The EA release had an HTTP based procotol handler for supporting MIDP1.0 phones. Thats something we may well do again.