Tycho Bittorrent

Coding hasn’t been this fun for ages.

During this week I have written producers for publishing info about Quake 3 servers, and a GUI with consumers to let a user discover the servers. Now it turns out that most of the grunt work for this was sorting out the Quake 3 server protocol, the Tycho parts were very easy to implement. Which is good - it is supposed to be easy to do this kind of thing and it will be nice to write about however it means this solution is not hardcore++.

So we have succeeded in showing how simple it can be to use Tycho, but that wasn’t the plan. We want to show Tycho being stretched not just that it can be nice and fluffy to work with.

I have gone back to the other main service we looked at writing - content delivery. Games need a way to deliver things like maps to clients. Our research has shown that distributing the bandwidth costs of this process is desirable as game server bandwidth is a precious commodity. So last night I started to write a ‘Bittorrent like’ program using Tycho, I have made it generic so it deals with distributing files - nothing game specific. I am not just blindly reimplementing the Bittorrent protocol in Tycho because we have the Tycho VR which lets us do some nifty things for finding endpoints rather than using using a ‘Bittorrent tracker’.

So this is what I’m working on now and it is sweet.