[ENet-discuss] NAT and Enet

[Charlie Sibbach]

Hey all,

I've been playing around with Enet for a while now, wrapping it in
some C++ classes, mainly for implementation abstraction. I'm going to
(most likely) use it for the backbone of the networking infrastructure
for an MMORPG project. Saves a lot of work coding my own reliable UDP
packet system, that's for sure.

I just have a few questions I want to put out to the pros and those
with experience:
1. Are Reliable-mode packets faster than TCP on average? I am using a
mix of both reliable and unreliable packets, but knowing how much I'm
actually saving can help adjust the balance. I can't test this in
real-world conditions yet so a test would be pretty meaningless.

2. Enet and NAT: Arch enemies? The central server for the game is a
distributed system designed to use multiple cheap CPUs instead of a
really fast one. The plan is to get a single static IP for cost
considerations, and use a generic NAT router like you get for your
home network. This would have port forwarding of some specified login
port to the "login server" which would handle new client requests. The
login server would then pass the connection to a specialized zone
server (using the inside-NAT addresses), by passing the incoming
client's IP address to the zone server, which will make an
outward-bound connection to the client. NAT could screw this up since
it usually works based on port numbers; does anybody have any
experience with this? Any advice? Should we just plan on needing
multiple static IPs, or are there some workarounds?

Thanks alot for any help.
-- 
~Charlie