Spring RTS Engine

Currently, if the person hosting quits or gets killed, is the game terminated? or is the "server" technically only the one who sets up the game and the running thereafter is independant of the hoster still being in-game?

At the moment all msgs have to pass the server and if he disconnects the game will end. However there isnt any real technical reason why the remaining clients shouldnt be able to negotiate a new server. Just a lack of time (aka laziness).

Perhaps it would be nice to have a dedicated server at some point in the future, like in most fps games.

Like a separate app just for serving games. That would definitely be a cool thing to add. As far as networking is concerned, if the server is renegotiated, couldn't that ruin the game in quite a few cases? ie, there was one player with great bandwidth and he dies first (because everyone else is jealous) and then the new renegotiated server has very poor bandwidth, and everyone has a hard time resuming the mayhem. Would a decentralized, server-independant networking system be doable? Something like a ring or star topology where everyone talks to everyone else.

You could do it completely peer to peer with everyone speaking to everyone. But then everyone would get laggy if one player had a laggy connection, as it is now only the lagger gets laggy responses (if he isnt the server of course). Also it would probably make it harder for nated ppl.

What about a hot-plugable dedicated servers?

Like when you have a server running, not use it for a single game, but constantly up and running. Available for anyone to use as server-node at any time they like.

Then the person that sets up the game could just chose a available server to run the game over, and then ask it for doing so.

This could then even be built out to some kind of fail-safety. That if the first server-node dies, then the clients could negotiate about continuing the game on an other server. (Perhaps from some list over available servers.)

Yeah I definitely like the idea of having one of those. After I make some good headway on the multiplayer service, I can see about one of those...