Re: Multiplayer Breakthrough!
Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2015 12:20 am
First, the idea of using a USB cable for mutiplayer, although it might work, is ridiculous and absurd, because then I might as well be using a Game Boy or something.TkSilver wrote:Ok lets make this a little simpler. If Drastic worked on only lets say the oneplus 1and people did not care about using the wifi radio for anything other then Drastic then maybe you could adjust the driver to work as a low latency connection. Assuming that the oneplus 1 or whatever phone/tablet you chose was capable of low latency communication in the first place.ericbazinga wrote: Well that sucks, because both of Exo's options would make the emulator super slow and therefore unplayable. But you're actually onto something with that WiFi driver idea. Different phones may have different hardware, but they all run Android, and users of DraStic would have to have good phones in order to run it anyway, so it wouldn't matter.
The reason the DS has a low latency local area connection is simple. The wifi radio's are designed both software and hardware to do it. For the most part there are only 2 different wifi chips at work the Nintendo DS one (DS and DS light) amd the DSi one that has a legacy mode to allow it to work with the original DS. Even if you get the software (drivers) to work if you do not have compatabile hardware it won't matter.
If you want a different idea that would be possible on mobile devices (maybe) them the best chance you have is figuring out how to hook up 2 devices with a USB cable and figure out a way to make a fake wifi hardware signal like you would if you ran 2 seprate instances on one device. Of any connection that a mobile phone has the speed of a direct connection like usb would be the lowest latency. I am not advocating this approach nor do I know if you can connect one android device to another through usb-otg bit that seems to be one of the only ways I could see outside of what exo said and even then you would probably have to sync the 2 devices.
Btw playing mario kart against others and some types of trading pokemon is infrastructure (online) play. That would involve the other issues thst exo put in the orriginal post you quoted. It is also the one that would be most likely to ever happen.
Second, device compatibility IS an issue. You're saying you'd probably need a special chip or something in order to use it, and there's not really much we can do if that's not there. I was thinking a compatibility checker would be ideal for making sure you do have that chip.
Third, yeah WiFi would be the more useful (especially since none of my friends have DraStic), but would most likely require a DraStic-only custom server due to the signals being different than that of an actual DS. But I think we should start with local multiplayer in a short-range area, and work our way up fro there.
But at this point I want to review what multiplayer would be like: Two users would play with/against each other over a local WiFi network. Perhaps with some experimentation, we could get this to work over 3G/4G (probably requiring another server), which might lag a bit but would throw the WiFi thing out the window. (At this point, I was going to add more, but I ran out of ideas.)
