Speaking as the designer of the network portion of a couple of those
popular games, the applications are _not_ broken. Sending the IP
addresses is the only working method to dynamically join and redirect
multiplayer games.This is getting off-topic, but is there any reason that src address in the
packet header doesn't work? Most (yes, all, I'm being silly) packets have
the src address set in the header, and it seems as if it would be a
reliable way to determine the uniqueness of a stream, seeing as that is how
this strange proprietary protocol named IP does it. What am I missing?
In the cases he is referring to addresses are passed at the application
level from the client initiating the call. For example, here is a list of
popular programs that pass addressing information at that level:
ftp
cuseeme
irc
real audio
quake
NAT can break these applications and special handling must be done to make
them work.
Justin W. Newton
Senior Network Architect
Priori Networks http://www.priori.net
ISP/C, Director at Large http://www.ispc.org
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