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Interested User requires more information

Ryan Humphreys
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
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Re: Interested User requires more information

Howard Stearns
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