A fast, easy to use, free, and community supported 2D game engine
jbarron
Member
Hi guys,
I have a quick question. Is it possible to establish a network connection between two iphones using the socket/stream classes? I assume it is, I just haven't got the means to try it out and was thinking I would ask just to make sure (also, I am not talking about Bonjour, I'd like to do it over the internet).
Yes, Bonjour is just something to help local services identify each other. The rest is still using sockets/streams to send/receive the data.
I can't say I'm an expert on it, but look on Apple's dev forums and you should find a bunch of people asking the same questions. And you should be able to find some answers there.
There's actually a lot of info around, but just not everyone understands how to do it. Here's a short post on it http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/iphone-sdk-development/2998-how-socket-connection.html
It's 3.0 and its name is GameKit. It is a framework that works with peer-to-peer connections
No problem if you know IP. Usually there is a server that connects users to each other. I believe there is no automagic solution to connect to user whose IP is not known.
The app Jumbli - http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/248#post-1350 - seems to use cocoaasyncsocket to connect back to a central server. http://code.google.com/p/cocoaasyncsocket/
Cocoaasyncsocket looks pretty good for what you want - obviously still need to write a server. What about Scoreloop - or openFeint? Don't they handle match making too?
Justin
jbarron
Member
Thanks for the link on Cocoaasyncsocket! Looks like a really useful utility library.
As for the scoreloop/open feint platforms, I'm not sure I want to buy into them just to get matchmaking, but it's interesting to check out the services they provide. Thanks again for the library link, I will probably end up using it in my project.
Very interesting. I'm thinking of using GameKit to conduct local matches in my game Mathogen. I want to establish a Tetris-like penalty system in my game where one player's achievement results in more obstacles dropping on the opponent's screen.
Has anyone successfully used GameKit to conduct multi-player matches in their Cocos2d game? Please share any wisdom you have gained from your experience with GameKit and Cocos2d.
OpenFeint and Scoreloop currently don't do anything resembling matchmaking (connecting two devices directly). They just route information lazily through their own servers.
If you want to make a real-time internet based game that can run on the iPhone, check out RakNet. It is a bit of a beast, but you soon realize that everything included in it is required to make it happen. These including matchmaking servers, and the very-important NAT punchthrough servers.
If you don't know anything about NAT, then you have a fun time ahead of you ;). Nearly all iPhones will be running behind NAT's, so connecting two of them is often non-trivial (ie, you need to be running a dedicated server just to make the connection happen).
I looked at GameKit, but it seemed too limited to do what I wanted to do. I I have a game currently working with real-time multiplayer over wifi using RakNet, so it can be done (there are others on the AppStore that already use RakNet for internet play).
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