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Warp Pipe Project - GameCube Online
chadlnx writes "The Warp Pipe Project, an open source project to bring LAN-based GameCube games online, recently released a specification detailing how GameCubes communicate over a network. The Warp Pipe Project is aggressively seeking out developers who would be interested in this project through its SourceForge project page."
Along with dropping prices, this sort of info can really incline people to getting a GameCube! /me digs around in his pocket for some spare change :-)
Disclaimer: The above comment was made while under the influence of too much coding and not enough sleep.
dorms are not for video games, they are for drinking like hobos and fucking like rabbits.. now, get to it
It's good to see the Gamecube haxors getting in on the fun. I was thinking about which one I would rather buy, a GameCube or XBox the other day, and the main thing that makes me lean towards the Xbox is the better network support. Now, maybe, I'll wait out a see what these guys can do.
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Crudely Drawn Games
They may go after these guys, but I doubt it. Remember that Gamespy mod for Halo which allowed internet play (albiet slowly)?. Microsoft didn't touch those guys (to my knowledge). While what these guys are doing isn't quite as simple as a firewall hack, I don't see how Nintendo can do anything about it. Unless, that is, they use some "magic" encryption on their connection...
Valid points, and I mentioned the possible GameSpy deal with Nintendo in the project's mission statement. However, color me a skeptic, I'll beleive it when I see it. Even if GameSpy does come up with something, I doubt that it will be free forever. This is just one of the things that makes open source great. As long as we are focused, we can pull out a great solution which will benefit us all in the long term.
According to the article, they use Universal Plug and Play to detect other gamecubes on the network. This is hard to route over the internet, but if they figure out a way to do it I don't think there is anything stopping them from releasing it.
So the application would have to accept gamecube packets, make a new packet with a larger TTL, send to another gc-app to strip away the outer packet and forward the original packet to the gamecube. Is this (or something similar) what the project would be doing? Essentially, if there is no other way of authenticating or bypassing UPNP, you are right on the money. This doesn't seem to be a very sleek and fast way of doing things, but keep in mind that UPNP authentication is a VERY small part of the process. The rest of the UDP packets (the raw game data) have TTL values of 255. They can be easily tunneled, forwarded, etc. They could also be converted into a series of TCP socket streams over the net. I saw this open source (I think it was in JAVA) Quake tunnel program which opened 30 sockets and kept sending TCP packets via one of the random sockets. The theory behind this was that the unused connections wouldn't take up any resources. The program is very fast and the solution works very well. Again, the UPNP authentication is the problem. Everything after that is much more reasonable to deal with.
I bought a GameCube a few months ago and love it. They've got a broadband adapter, but only one online game so far: Fantasy Star Online.
XBox developers and Microsoft have embraced online gaming as a big piece of the future of console gaming. Nintendo still needs to come around. I'm hoping that catch up (I think Microsoft & Co. are right!)
The hardware's ready when they are!