Subject: SIP carrying videogame data not originally designed with this in mind; (THANK YOU)

From: [email-masked] (Dan Kolis)
Date: Thu, 16 May 2002 14:13:16 -0400

Hi,

My thinking and the thinking of the named persons are sort of mixed together
as follows. If you worry about who thought what, please see the previous
half dozen posts.

Subject is carrying Gaming console data inside SIP sessions.

"John Stracke" <[email-masked]>
  Tunnelling may work but its not ideal compared to a 
  knowledegable App. Security is a specific problem.

"Christian Huitema" <[email-masked]>
  Some sort of concurentcy problem may be caused by Ethernet 
  tunneling, and it may load servers. Since SIP is peer to peer, 
  unless the players are behind a firewall/Media port of some sort, 
  I don't see what server is loaded. I might be missing something. 
  "Sending game messages like IM messages" is pretty well exactly 
  what I want. The SIP processes themselves are (hopefully) fast
  enough to handle real time video, so if there a bottleneck for
  the game, there not coded well.
  Christian says:
    "The architecturally correct way to use SIP for
    games is to use a SIP exchange to initiate a game session, i.e.
    INVITE "sip:[email-masked]"
    to join a game. The payload of the SIP messages (INVITE 
    and response) will carry the IP address and port numbers used
    by the game application."
  I fear I don't know enough about how the INVITE would be able
  to envolk the game process. If the game can 'register' or
  whatever to the SIP process and be envolked this might be close
  to ideal. Since a major goal is to have other multimedia components
  running simultainiously not known to the game application, there
  are other problems. If it was a X-windows type thing, it would be
  easy. But games seem to be mostly sort of hard coded for I/O so
  even if the SIP syntax and theory of it works if the apps can't
  get at the resources, the thing still fails to do what I hope
  it to do.

"John Stracke" <[email-masked]>
  Mostly a few comments on Christian Huitema's post. Also sees
  the simularity to Instant Messages as a a situation, not
  specifically a problem.

"Henry Sinnreich" <[email-masked]>
  Henry said:
    The IM Session Mode allows the transfer of big/rich media 
    directly between the endpoints, once SIP has set up the 
    session."
  I get that; sort of. It seems like its hard to discriminate between
  the behavior of the protocol when it needs a thing from the
  operating system. Stuff like browsers seem to have some step like
  "registering" a .DLL or what have you to make the linkages 
  explicit and long lasting; (beyond one power up). Even this is
  vaguer in a gaming console. It has some non-volitile memory, but
  its often removable, so it is unpleasant to have each game have
  a behavior that depends on how its envolked.
  Its a hard problem. Obviously a precise relationship on the game
  side would be ideal, but what is this protocol; "most like". I
  sort of visualize a TCP Telnet like session? Well, I don't know.

I really appreciate the thinking of everyone on this. Thank you and if you
have opinions please continue to post them. I think its an ok topic for this
forumn. Just general enough? Hope I'm right on this.

Regards,
Dan Kolis

Dan Kolis - Lindsay Electronics Ltd [email-masked]
50 Mary Street West, Lindsay Ontario Canada K9V 2S7
(705) 324-2196 X 268          (705) 324-5474 Fax
An ISO 9001 Company; SCTE Member ISM-127194
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