Post 17 Nov 2009, 12:17 by Lewin
Well, it tends to be off-topic but HTTP wasn't designed for the most of things that it's being used for. By the way, I don't really understand how much routers are worth if I cannot handle different ports in the same time.
I'm sorry but there would be no reason to use HTTP. It would take a lot more effort and add overheads for no gain. Creating your own protocol is extremely easy, they did it for multiplayer KaM, so why shouldn't they do it for the master server? And if it's run by the company Net-Games, it's not like they'd be trying to cut corners (although I think it would actually do the reverse) because it'd be used in lots of games. The only time HTTP would make sense is if the whole lobby system was written in HTML, which seems VERY unlikely because back in those days it was hard to make complicated HTML scripts that sent data back to the server without refreshing the entire page all the time. (i.e. before Web 2.0 and Ajax was invented) HTML would also be slow for the purpose which is very simple; just setting up a game and playing it. (which would be using the normal multiplayer KaM protocol to send the data presumably) And it would be hard to make it look like KaM, with custom edit boxes etc.
And anyway, even if you used the HTTP protocol to transport the data, you would still have to write your own protocol inside that to structure your data.
As for ports, yes, routers can handle different ports at the same time but the master KaM server will only be listening on the port(s) used by the protocol, not every single one of the 65535 ports available.

(a lot of them are used/reserved for other things anyway)