A few days ago I stumbled across a post by Hank Williams. It appears there is a little “secret” feature in the flash player that allows clients to directly connect to one another. When I read this I was as excited as I was when I read about the XML Socket Connection in Flash 5, until I realized it would not do what I thought it would. The ability to make lightweight multiplayer games without server reliance is something I have been wanting to do for a while. It looks like there is a catch though.

From everything I have read it appears that you will need to have flash media server running in order to manage the connections. In some ways this makes sense as if someone drops then other clients need to be notified of the drop and any updates that need to happen. To me this seems like the type of thing that could be handled with a server script but perhaps I am being naive. The reliance on flash media server takes development out of reach of the guys who don’t have $4500 and a dedicated server to set up. I am hoping this is not Adobe trying to force sales of FMS.

I am also curious about ports. Flash media server will forward you over to the standard http port if you do not have access to the default. I am hoping that the p2p communication does the same. If not, this looses a lot of momentum, as getting an IT dept to forward a port is probably a lot harder than installing a custom piece of software on a machine, greatly limiting the value of this feature. We shall see how things pan out, but in the mean while it looks like I’ll have to install a trial version of FMS on some old pentium to see how well this setup works.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Actionscript, Flash.