Efficient Packet Structures - Help?

kurifu · 2002-01-10T19:59:10

I have started to think about how I am going to format the incoming data packets (both UDP and TCP as the server will rely upon both protocols in different circumstances), and I seem to have come down to a few options.. however I am not presently satisfied with their efficiency and would like to ask for advice on more efficient packet stucturing, transmission, and receival. String Parsing Technique: I could just append all of the data, using wsprintf, into a text string and send that data. When the server receives this data it will parse the string, figure out what information is in the string, and make the appropriate changes. Only thing I do not like about this is that there will be an immense amount of work to parse the string and collect the data from it. Structure Tecnique: Well, as an attempt to not have to parse the strings from above, my other solution would be to create a structures for each type of outgoing packet, fill the structures, and read them back on the server end. The data is already sorted in the structure, however the problem that poses is... what structure am I supposed to be receiving? What happens if the packet is too large for the client? Another attempt at this would be to create a generic structure type with two fields, one a word, and the rest an array of char so that any data can be easily passed into it, and when the packet type is identified from the word, the data can be recasted into its proper structure type. Only problem I see here is that the full array of char will be transmitted, and may only contain 2 bytes of relevant data... this is a waste of bandwidth. I am not even entirely sure how much MSVC++ will like recasting the structures at that... Now, if I were to change that array of char to a pointer of char in the packet, though the pointer can hold a dynamic quantity of information, the problem comes that when you try to send the structure, the pointer address will be passed and not the information that it is pointing to (and will lead to a nice mess of random or corrupt data, and likely even an access violation). Anyone know of any good solutions to this problem or have any ideas? All help will be greatly appreciated. Sincerely, Clifford M. Roche Gamedev''s AI Auto-Reply bot.

Networking and Multiplayer Programming

Started by kurifu December 27, 2001 05:08 PM

29 comments, last by kurifu 22 years, 8 months ago

Shannon Barber

1,684

January 10, 2002 07:59 PM

The only issue with bitfield encoding is that it increases the complexity of the parser - this is one of things compression coders will do.

(Shifting bits around is almost free - nop takes _longer)

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Efficient Packet Structures - Help?

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