IPX worked very well for LAN games, it required no configuration. Compared to how difficult it is to play together now (steam friends. xbox...), it was much better.
Of course it had drawbacks, but for that it was great.
Of course it had drawbacks, but for that it was great.
Anyway...one afternoon I was at a law office installing some legal library software (or something), and one of the younger lawyers asked me into his office. He had a couple copies of Warcraft and Command & Conquer, he had installed them on a couple of the office computers but couldn't get network play going.
Not really knowing what I was doing, I opened up the properties dialog for the network adapter, added the IPX/SPX protocol, and started the game up on two computers.
It worked! It was that simple. I remember the guy pulling a $50 out of his wallet and handing it to me. And, since they were within walking distance of our office, I got invited back over a couple times and we played a lot of games (and drank a lot of beer) over there.
IPX/SPX worked without that assumption; it was bog simple to find some IPX cards, shove them in the computers, connect them, and go, even if you knew nothing.
The closest for TCP/IP would be to support gaming over link-local links (those 169.* addresses) but everything is assumed to be on the internet now.
And if you have TCP/IP for the internet, rarely do you care or need anything else for local comms.
The big downside is that if some people are on WiFi then they'll be reduced down to 802.11b speed.
A better solution would be to do server/player discovery via multicast and then stitch up unicast links for the actual gameplay.
> A better solution would be to do server/player discovery via multicast and then stitch up unicast links for the actual gameplay.
That's basically what most mDNS applications do today (the modern standards compliant name for used to be called Bonjour): use .local multicast for service discovery and then often use that to bootstrap to unicast links. It's not a bad way to go, with the only caveats that to get good mDNS support in Windows I believe that you still have to dig into WinRT components rather than old school Win32 sockets APIs and that especially seems to cramp many games from even trying to use it for LAN discovery today despite it being a mostly reliable standard in 2022.
>The first version of the Doom IPX network code transmitted its data as broadcast data. As a result of this, all machines on a network where a game of Doom was being played would receive the data, even if the machine was not involved in the game. The degrading effect on network performance forced the system administrators for many office networks to ban Doom.
Few people actually built IPX networks, let alone routed them, etc.
The complications most people associate with Bonjour/Avahi and its "points of failure" are most often issues with optional add-on standards such as DNS-SD [1] UPnP [2], and other related add-on standards on top of mDNS that make up so called "zero-conf networking". You don't need DNS-SD or UPnP to use mDNS for basic hostname discovery.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_DNS
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-configuration_networking#...
Though I have seen games that apparently use an internet service to coordinate direct links ...
On a typical home network I've never really had any issues with mDNS. It works great on Mac and I've got it running fine on various bsd's and linux. I found mdnsd worked surprisingly well on FreeBSD, and took less configuration that Avahi. I will admit that windows doesn't seem to play that well with it.
I'm curious what you tried that didn't work.
Even now it's only somewhat doable to do it without relying on 3rd parties by using wireguard. So I can see why relying on a third party became the default.
If IPv6 and NAT was not a thing then IP LAN games would have probably had no trouble. Factorio still does multiplayer through direct UDP/IP, so you can definitely play it online purely IP P2P. I've played Factorio games served using ZeroTier before with no issue and it's allowed me to host Factorio on my laptop from both home and a hotel.
Scanning your/24 network works, but many people are on 10.x.x.x these days
And I don’t know how this works on ipv6