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.
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#...
>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.
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.