Hello everybody,

I've been struggling with a nasty sittuation the past couple of days and couldn't find anything to solve my problem on the net, so I just think it's natural to try and find some help here.

Here's what I'm working on:

I want to make an website from where you can download games and play them with other people registered to the site. Like a match-making service, the website part (a couple of PHP scripts) it's only used to see who's online, who currently hosts a game and so on. I used cURL to achieve this and it's working great.

Now, I want to test an actual game beeing played over the network, just to see how teh web server works with it. I knew about ZoidCom and worked with it before (in terms of two separate applications, the server and the client) so that's not helping me much in my sittuation. I need both of them in the application so the player can choose to host or join a game.

Still, there's something I'm doing wrong because the application doesn't allways connect (as in one to each other). What I want to find out first is, how does Zoidom detect clients that want to connect to the server.

I'm testing with a console tic-tac-toe game so here's what I do. After connecting to the webserver, I initialize the Server class or the Client class, depending on what the user chooses. After this, I run straight to the game loop, breaking every law of networking I think... What I do is checking for input (x and y coordinates) and send that to the other party (the client or the server). They both check input and apply the modifications on the grid, as well as their own actions. The problem is, that I have to run through the code (calling processInput() and processOutput()) a few times before the client requests a connection, then a few trime to get him connected. Is there a problem if I'm testing this locally? I followed and implemented the "chat" tutorial fine before. I'm passing variables using addInt(whatever, 4). Is 4 to much? I don't know how bits actually work... (I'm guessing 4 means a maximum value of 2^4, but it's just a guess).

Sorry for the very long post for such a trivial problem.

4 bits = (2^4)-1 is the maximum value.

The difference between local and remote testing is that with remote testing the gameloop will run more often in your case before the connection is set up because it takes longer to transmit the packets. Zoidcom detects incoming connections by listening on an UDP socket. So if a client wants to connect, the server receives a packet, then sends a packet back and then once again from the client to the server until the connection is established on both sides (if you use the 0.6 version that is - 0.7 sends more packets).

So i should call processInput() and processOutput() on both sides for a while, then ZCom_cbConnectionRequest() gets called on server side, ZCom_cbConnectResult() on the client side and only then ZCom_cbConnectionSpawned() back on the server, thus connection is made?

Is it safe to loop a processInput(), processOutput() function until the connection is spawned?

Exactly, and yes to everything!