Re: [pygame] peer-to-peer networked games

[Miriam English <mim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Okay, I've found some stuff that I hadn't heard of before that some of 
you folks might be interested in:

VAST - http://vast.sourceforge.net
In development and has some working examples of p2p networking that can 
apparently be used for massively multiplayer games. C# and some old Java 
source code is is downloadable (including a firefox plugin).

Solipsis - http://solipsis.netofpeers.net
This died a while back but seems to be coming back to life. They use a 
fairly simple-looking chat between 2D images that could probably be 
adapted for games. The old code and webpages are still online at the 
site as an archive at
http://solipsisarchive.netofpeers.net
The python source code is downloadable.

HyperVerse - http://hyperverse.syssoft.uni-trier.de
Is still in development, but doesn't appear to have any downloadable 
code yet.

Making p2p virtual worlds has been anticipated by many people for almost 
a decade. I'm a little surprised that it is taking so long to get off 
the ground. Sure, nobody is going to make billions of dollars by owning 
the choke-hold on the technology -- once it's out then it can't be 
controlled. Nevertheless the same is true in some respects of the net 
itself, and of p2p filesharing, and both of those are now almost 
indispensable parts of modern life.

Good luck to anybody who wants to take a shot at this.

Cheers,

	- Miriam


Miriam English wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> Does anybody know of any peer-to-peer networking games?
>
> I'm writing a story (http://miriam-english.org/stories/prescription) and 
> I want my character to play inside p2p networked games.
>
> The advantages of p2p over a centralised server are that the system 
> can't be controlled to charge users money, the system is potentially 
> more reliable with less chance of the whole thing going down at once, it 
> should cost nothing to maintain with no expensive central servers and 
> each client machine also serving up a part of the world. Bittorrent 
> shows how distributed systems scale so much more easily than centralised 
> ones. P2p also has some slight disadvantages -- no wealthy mogul to 
> underwrite development, there is always the chance that some parts of 
> the shared world might be inaccessible because the machines that hold 
> those portions in their cache are not currently online. But those are 
> small problems, really.
>
> The only way to build planet-wide gameworlds accessible to millions of 
> people will be through p2p networking, I believe.
>
> I have found Hyperverse (http://hyperverse.syssoft.uni-trier.de), but it 
> doesn't seem to be in much more than the testing phase for some code 
> fragments so far.
>
> Anybody know of anything else?
>
> I assume pygame could do this kind of thing, however I don't know what 
> p2p tools any of the python networking libraries have.
>
> Cheers,
>
>     - Miriam

--
If you don't have any failures then you're not trying hard enough.
 - Dr. Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
-----
Website: http://miriam-english.org
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