Re: Gamekit & peer to peer connections
Re: Gamekit & peer to peer connections
- Subject: Re: Gamekit & peer to peer connections
- From: Jens Alfke <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2014 22:35:03 -0700
On Jun 23, 2014, at 9:13 PM, email@hidden wrote:
> But I may eventually move to non-mac systems and gamekit can't be used.
Yes, Apple seems to be completely uninterested in opening up Multipeer Connectivity or the lower-level technologies it uses (like peer-to-peer WiFi networks.) I think they see it as a competitive advantage against Android, but it makes those technologies unusable for many developers.
> Are there any frameworks or libraries available which handle discovery between clients.
If you want to do the kind of local p2p discovery Multipeer Connectivity (GameKit) does, just use Bonjour (NSNetService).
I don’t know the status of Bonjour (aka mDNS and DNS-SD) on Android; if it’s not built-in then there are probably libraries you can use to provide it, since it’s an open standard. It’s definitely available on Windows and Linux.
> Also, from what I have read, client to client discovery must be done via a 3rd party server (besides fiddling with the modem/router firewall and port forwarding settings which most users can't/won't do).
If you want to support discovery and connectivity beyond the LAN, then yes. This area is kind of a rabbit-hole, with a whole alphabet soup of technologies to look at. Two current promising once are WebRTC and Telehash. The latter doesn’t require servers; it uses a distributed p2p routing system based on a Kademlia distributed hash table. (It should be able to transparently punch through NATs without user intervention, because it’s based on UDP.)
—Jens
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