I tried the twisted as separate process thing for a while when i was working with Blender's game engine. At the time it was the only way I knew how to do it, but it was very unwieldy to work with and deploy, just not a good system at all. You are already introducing issues with network communication, why introduce issues with local communication as well.
Currently I am using sockets with threads, it works pretty well I think. It seems extremely stable, and fast enough, if I could get my higher level constructs in order. The hard part with network programming in my opinion is the higher level stuff rather than the protocol. How to serialize the data, what data to send, and how to interpret it, is very difficult if you want a smooth game. No networking library I have seen handles this for you. I'd like to see someone write a game network library that handles things like moving characters around and sending chat messages - 95% of networked games need these two things. But most games are so specialized and integrated that it's hard to modularize this functionality to make it general enough for a library. If I ever completely solve my netcode, I don't see myself being up to that task. I used to really like twisted, but it's sort of a hard nut to crack sometimes. When using basically the raw tcp or udp protocols, twisted seems like massive overkill to me, and none of it's constructs seem all that well tailored to games. That might have changed in the few years I've been away though. What things like raknet, hawkNL, etc give you, is the ability for reliable udp sockets, which does make some things a bit easier and smoother. But really, the socket module IS everything you need. It's just a lot of work to set up and learn to use it. On Nov 20, 2007 12:49 PM, Richard Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, 21 Nov 2007, David wrote: > > 1) Use Twisted with reactor.iterate > > I found that this approach has quite a high impact (ie. takes a considerable > amount of time to run, even when there's no network events). > > > > 2) Use the Twisted reactor *as* your main loop, and implement all game > > logic as call-backs from there. This is the approach that the Twisted > > people will recommend. > > This is also useless for highly interactive games. > > > > 3) Run the Twisted reactor in its own thread > > This is probably the only reasonable approach for games. > > > > 5) Run the Twisted reactor in its own process, and use pipes or sockets to > > pass data between > > it and the main loop/process. This has the merit of using the OS's CPU > > allocation management > > rather than that of Python's thread manager. > > Quite difficult to manage on Windows. > > > Richard >
