Fall Quarter 1998 Additions by the Network/Communications Group

Guaranteed Packets

 At the beginning fo Fall 98, there were basic communications in place using UDP (see udpvtcp.html). As the thought that "guaranteeing" a UDP packet made UDP much more desirable than making the system go to TCP, the only thing left to do was implement these guaranteed packets. The outline was there, but the implementation was not.

The approach was taken to grab the system time, wait a second, and if no ack was received to the previously sent guaranteed, retransmit the packet. This will happen three times. Onthe fourth timeout, the system calls the appropriate functions to purge that client's info from the server, assuming it has lost connection.

Chat Subsystem

An obvious need in a virtual reality environment is interaction between the various people in the "world" at that time. With this in mind, chat was a goal for our team. The work progressed slowly with the learning curve inherent in absorbing the new project.

The project had primal functionality in palce for chat when we arrived. However, the chat capability included the ability to send two ungarbled characters. It was driven from the same window that all system I/O was accomplished in. This functionality was extended in Fall 98 to include longer strings with a much increased chance of them being ungarbled on the other end.

At the end of Fall 98, our group was presented with the demo that included the gui_viewer and an external command line interface. This command line interface was used (and some might say abused) for the work built in Winter 99, all interfacing the subsystem solidified in Fall 98.

Thu Mar 18 17:34:05 EST 1999

Stephen Forinash (autmieon@cc)
J Austin Hijar (sithlord@cc)