[pygame] Re: a gsoc idea: networking

[Tyler Laing <trinioler@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

That sounds remarkably like Bittorrent. If you check the internet
archive or other sites, you should be able to find the Python code for
Bittorrent before it was closed.

About server discovery, my concern is that most systems can be easily
polluted with malicious entries. Look at all the issues with DNS
(which is pretty much exactly what you propose), and what needs to be
done to prevent ARP poisoning attacks. Any such system would have to
be designed  to distribute the authentication in a secure way. And if
attackers have control over one or more nodes, it can be difficult to
ensure authority and correctness without a centralized server, hence
the Root DNS nodes.

It sounds like some interesting ideas, but the problems are ones that
still stump PhD's...

-Tyler

On Mar 19, 11:39 am, Michael George <mdgeo...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I'm making a game similar to fantastic contraption (http://fantasticcontraption.com/).  One of the cool features of that
> game is that users can create their own levels and solutions, and they
> can be shared, ranked and played by other players.  I'd love to have
> that functionality, but like many pygame developers I'm writing a free
> game, and I'm too poor to host that kind of service.  One alternative
> would be to build some kind of peer-to-peer replicated solution where
> players hold copies of data that they select, as well as some amount of
> other user's data, with an overlay scheme used to avoid a centralized
> server.  I think the sharing of user-rated content is a unique space for
> p2p systems, and I don't know if there's a good existing solution there.
>
> Another related idea would be to build a latency-sensitive overlay
> network for doing game discovery for multiplayer games.  Currently, I
> think most internet multiplayer games use a centralized server to do
> discovery.  Again, this design requires more resources than many
> open-source games have available.
>
> I'm not sure if there are good solutions for these problems already, but
> if not, I think it would be useful to have a module for doing this
> available.  I think these projects would be ambitious, but doable, and
> might even lead to a nice research paper if a student wanted to go that
> direction.  I might be able to mentor a student if they wanted to take
> on one of these projects.
>
> --Mike