Connect by IP

clamburger

I often play Spaceteam with friends, and one of the main issues is that it sometimes takes a while to get everybody connected (which primarily involves everybody jumping in and out of the lobby until everybody is in).

I'm not how it works internally, but would it be possible for one person to say "okay I'll be the server" and everybody else just enters their IP to connect?

hengineer

I know, the connection code isn't the greatest.
Technically the first person to choose Play will (almost always) be the "server" and the others will try to connect to them. But I think it would take just as long to share and manually enter IP addresses as it would to just try connecting again.
It would also complicate the UI flow and I'd like to keep it as simple as possible. I'd much rather just make the existing connection code more reliable. If I ever find a cross-platform framework for easy local multiplayer connections I will integrate it in a heartbeat.

iBkin

have you looked into the technology behind airdrop in iOS7? If i understand correctly, it uses bluetooth to "pair" the devices and then uses a ad-hoc wifi network to transfer data.
I know airdrop itself isn't cross-platform, but the people at open garden have made fire-chat which uses similar technology cross-platform. I wish i knew more about how it worked, but maybe it's something you could research.
I usually don't have problems in spaceteam unless i'm using an older android device. iOS devices and my nexus 5 work pretty consistently.

werewulf

Weirdly, our most frustrating connection problems always seem to happen between ipads and iphones (all 4's or 4S's)

Spudz777

I realize I'm resurrecting an old thread here, but I'm with clamburger here. I've never had any luck at all connecting an iOS device to an Android device over wifi, ever. We spent almost an hour with two iPhones and two Kindle Fires (different versions) trying to get them to talk to each other. No luck. The Kindles would talk to each other (most of the time... some issues there as well), the phones would talk to each other almost all the time, but not once did the two OS's ever see each other.

I definitely get the "make it as easy as possible so people don't have to think about it" mentality, but sometimes you need a fallback option. You can even bury the IP connection option pretty deeply so it doesn't mess up the UI flow unless you go looking for it...

This is one of the main problems I have with a lot of tech companies today, they're so interested in making things "easy" that there's no way for techies like me to diagnose and fix things when they go wrong.

For the record, here's a short list of what we tried:
- everyone on same network
- Kindle hits play first, iPhone hits play first, hit at "same" time
- reboot all devices
- check for updates (are iOS and Android supposed to be different version numbers?)
- reboot router
- check settings on router (multicast, etc.)
- set up a new unsecured isolated wifi network, repeat above

I love this game, but we've been unable to get more than two devices connected together, even when we have lots of matching OS's; wifi, bluetooth, doesn't matter...

hengineer

Hi @Spudz777,
In your particular case the problem is actually that the Kindle version is woefully out of date with respect to the latest iOS and Google Play builds. Because Amazon devices are such a small market for me I just can't justify keeping it current, so it's stuck at version 1.5 (I think) which means it can only connect to other 1.5 versions but no later versions.

If you want you can try manually installing the generic Android version on your Kindle from this page: http://spaceteamadmiralsclub.com/forum/androidBuilds
I'm not sure how well it will work but if it does run then it should connect to your iPhones fine.

The situation should soon improve however, since I'm currently rebuilding the entire game including the networking system. The new version will not only be more reliable but I'll make sure to include some advanced connection options!

Spudz777

That would be greatly appreciated. I'll look into the generic Android version for the Kindles. I did think it strange that the version numbers were different...

For the record, the apk works fine. Thank you! I still look forward to being able to specify IPs in a future version.