Iphone Game Dev Over The Internet

Question

Hello, I was wondering is there an easy way to communicate between iphones over the Internet(Not LAN/Bluetooth) or must there be a dedicated server in which all the iphones running an application needs to connect to?

For instance, suppose I'm writing a game which works on the Internet. Once four clients joins a room, game starts. must I implement a server in which every Iphone client connects to (for instance if server was developed on Windows it could be a Service) or is there another way to address this when developing Internet-based application?

Thank you

Answer 1

You'd at the very least need some sort of central match making service so that the iPhones would be able to find each other, which would require some sort of dedicated server.

Secondly, devices on the internet can't always simply do a direct connection with each other. If all of the devices are behind a NAT or a firewall that doesn't allow incoming connections, you'd need a central dedicated server to host the game on. If at least one of the iPhones can accept incoming direct connections, you could have that iPhone host the game for the others.

There are some ways to punch through a NAT, but they're generally pretty horrifying in their complexity, and you'd still need the central match making service to pair up players.

Answer 2

We have an online game that uses the iPhone (see www.ownthisworld.com if you want an idea of what we have done). Basically we use a php back end that accepts requests and returns xml data to the phone. It works quite well, but it depends on how much data you would be sending and your expected response times. In any event, our architecture of PHP/MySql backend works fine for our needs. By using the normal internet route, you do not have to worry about firewalls so much either.