Looking through old mail, I don't think anyone responded. [And I was
sure there was a writeup on this, but now I can't find it...]
The short answer is yes, you can meet up with folks if you all have
access to a single, known, fixed IP-address:port combination that is
going to do the routing. Each participant will need only an
"outgoing" connection to that port. (I.e., the participant will
initiate the connection.) That should make it relatively easy to work
with most firewall configurations.
The longer answer is that Croquet SDK 1.0 has limited WAN support.
All of the demos except one (KAT) will work automatically on a LAN
without any pre-arrangement. (The "Master" that starts up first
broadcasts itself on the LAN. Everyone else will find it.) However,
there are two examples that go further:
* Starting the SimpleDemo creates a router with one world on it,
and provides a tool (Tools->What's My Location) that displays
information including "Postcard as XML", which is a text
serialization of the connection information for this router, and
which can be sent via mail, text chat, etc. Another user can paste
that into Tools->Connect to Another World in order to connect across
the WAN. On the one host machine, you will need to make the
operating-system selected port available to the Internet.
* The KAT demo prompts at startup for a fixed IP address to connect
to. The default is an experimental server we maintain that has a
router with several worlds. Or you can enter an empty string and it
will start it's own router and worlds on your machine, similarly to
SimpleDemo. If you tell that address to others, they can type it in
and connect to you. On the one host machine, you will need to make
port 5910 available to the Internet.
But the above just describes connectivity. Performance matters a lot
more on WAN than LAN. All of the demos except that KAT generate a LOT
of unnecessary traffic, and in practice, this results in some pretty
unacceptable WAN performance. The KAT is the first public attempt at
tuning this, and the results are quite often already good enough.
See
http://www.wetmachine.com/item/685 and <a href="http://www.nabble.com/Re%">http://www.nabble.com/Re%
3A-driving-me-crazy-tf2872513.html#a8075618
On Feb 13, 2007, at 11:39 AM, Ryan Humphreys wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have been interested in Croquet for several months now, but am not
> sure whether your project can work for a business idea I have. Whom
> could I speak to regarding whether Croquet will work?
>
> One of my questions is whether Croquet spans across firewalls today.
> Can I go on and "meet up" with another party in Croquet-space if they
> are across the country, for example?
>
> My question sounds rather basic, but I am having difficulty answering
> this question by looking at your website.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ryan
Locked
