I am making a simple game with multiplayer mode in it. I need to somehow send data between one player and other. I can't find a way to transfer data between two clients. Is there a way to forward them through the server?
I'm using the socketserver library to accept connections. Here is the way I handle connections.
def handle(self):
data = self.request.recv(BUFFSIZE).decode("utf-8")
print("Received connection")
print(data)
From the 90s playbook: one of the clients can be a server; other clients (on the same LAN) connect to it.
It won't work well outside a LAN, because of NAT.
Normally you would need to run a dedicated server somewhere that would let users connect, and would route messages between them.
Naturally you would want to run all the game logic on the server, and leave to the clients only the display of state, and user input.
Also, a single server could host several games.
Implementation-wise, the socket server from standard library would be a good start; the HTTP server from the same standard library, an even easier start.
Related
I am attempting to create a basic chatroom in python, and I would like to know how I could transmit data from one script to another, preferably without using google drive. If needed to, I could create a webserver on Replit, but I don't do well with HTML or PHP.
Side note: I can't port forward, as my google wifi doesn't accept any level of port forwarding.
I would send messages of about 50 characters every couple seconds
Since you mention port forwarding, I assume you want two chat clients that run on different local networks to talk to each other, for example your own and the chat client of a friend in a remote location, over the internet.
If you (or your counterpart) cannot set up port forwarding, then direct communication between the script on your computer and theirs is hard, if not impossible. The solution is to set up a third computer or service on the internet that can be reached by both clients and use it for relaying messages between them.
A network is typically protected by a firewall of sorts and will typically be behind a router that performs network address translation (NAT) to help multiple devices on a network to simultaneously access services on the internet, whilst all using the same IP address on the internet. Port forwarding fits into that by connecting a specific port from the outside directly to a port on a machine on the inside - without that, an outside computer might be able to reach your IP address, but they could never connect to a computer or program on the inside of the network, as the router wouldn't know what computer to contact, also the firewall might disallow the connection to begin with.
But if your computer on the inside establishes a connection with an accessible server on the internet, expecting a response, that creates a temporary conduit through the router and firewall that can be used by the server to send messages (look up 'hole punching' for more information). And if both computers do this, the server can relay message between both clients. Only the server then needs to run in an environment that doesn't have firewall restrictions or NAT that prevent this.
You could write a simple Python server, that accepts incoming connections and can send several responses and a simple client that connects to it, identifying itself and joining a chatroom, or having a direct conversation with another connected client. There are many techniques that would allow you to do this, but I think web sockets might be a good starting point, as long as you don't plan to do advanced fast or high volume stuff that would require something like a UDP connection.
A library like websockets could be a good starting point, but you may want to start out by figuring out where you would have this service hosted first, since there may be limitations on what you're able and allowed to do.
Also, if all you're looking to do is send simple messages, you may want to stay away from writing your own server an protocols at all - have a look around for open source message servers written in a language you are comfortable with, or that just work out of the box without any development, in which case the language doesn't even really matter, as long as you can connect to it and exchange messages from Python.
I'm new to the world of networking and wanted to clarify some of my thoughts regarding a problem I am facing at the moment. I saw this post which makes me think what I'm doing may be impossible, but I thought it would be worth a shot to ask on here and see what more qualified people think about it.
I am a TA for an intro computer science course, and I am writing a final project for students to complete at the end of the semester. Essentially, the project would be to fill in the holes in the implementation of a messaging client. I have set it up so each client would run two threads (one to listen for incoming messages, and one to wait for input to send messages to the other client). I have gotten this to work successfully on localhost with communication between two different port numbers, and am trying to find a way to have this work over the network so the two clients do not necessarily have to be on the same machine.
After struggling through a few methods, I came up with this solution: I would host a server on Heroku that would keep track of the clients' IPs and port numbers, and use a rest API so that one client could easily get the IP and port of the other client they are trying to communicate with. I have tested this, and the API seems to work. Thus, a client can create a socket endpoint and send it to this server to be entered into its database, and when the communication is terminated, it is removed from the database (this JSON would store a username as the primary key and internally manage an IP and port number) as the connection is now closed.
So, what I have is each client with an IP and port number knowing the IP and port number it is trying to communicate with. My last struggle is to actually form the connection. I understand there is a distinction between localhost (127.0.0.1) and the public IP for an internet endpoint. Upon searching, I found a way to find the public IP for the current user to share with the database, but I cannot bind to it. Whenever I try to, I get sockets error code 13: permission denied. I would imagine that if I tried connecting to the public IP of the other machine, I would get a similar error (but I cannot test the client until I can get a server running!).
I read online that some router work would be needed to actually form this connection between two machines. I guess I'm struggling to understand the practicality of socket programming if such a simple operation (connecting two socket endpoints on two different computers) requires so much tweaking. Is there something I am missing?
For reference, here is a general outline of my code thus far. The server:
# Server thread
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.bind((LOCAL_IP, AVAILABLE_PORT))
s.listen(1)
# In my code, there is a quitting mechanism which closes s as well.
while True:
client_socket, addr = s.accept()
data = client_socket.recv(1024)
print "Received: " + data
client_socket.close()
...and the client:
# Client thread
# It is an infinite loop so I am always waiting for another potential message to send
while True:
x = raw_input()
sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
sock.connect((OTHER_MACHINE_LOCAL_IP, OTHER_PORT))
sock.sendall(x)
sock.close()
Right now, I cannot make progress with these permission denied errors. Is there any way I could get this to work? Understand that, being that this would be for around 250ish students to use who are all intro CS students, I would want to avoid having to instruct them to do anything with their routers.
If there is another method to do this which would make this easier that I am missing, I would also love to hear any suggestions :) Thanks in advance!
I'm writing a Socket Server in Python, and also a Socket Client to connect to the Server.
The Client interacts with the Server in a way that the Client sends information when an action is invoked, and the Server processes the information.
The problem I'm having, is that I am able to connect to my Server with Telnet, and probably other things that I haven't tried yet. I want to disable connection from these other Clients, and only allow connections from Python Clients. (Preferably my custom-made client, as it sends information to communicate)
Is there a way I could set up authentication on connection to differentiate Python Clients from others?
Currently there is no code, as this is a problem I want to be able to solve before getting my hands dirty.
When a new connection is made to your server, your protocol will have to specify some way for the client to authenticate. Ultimately there is nothing that the network infrastructure can do to determine what sort of process initiated the connection, so you will have to specify some exchange that allows the server to be sure that it really is talking to a valid client process.
#holdenweb has already given a good answer with basic info.
If a (terminal) software sends the bytes that your application expects as a valid identification, your app will never know whether it talks to an original client or anything else.
A possible way to test for valid clients could be, that your server sends an encrypted and authenticated question (should be different at each test!), e.g. something like "what is 18:37:12 (current date and time) plus 2 (random) hours?"
Encryption/Authentication would be another issue then.
If you keep this algorithm secret, only your clients can answer it and validate themselves successfully. It can be hacked/reverse engineered, but it is safe against basic attackers.
I'm starting to write an udp server to match two clients together and allow them to send/receive data to/from each other.
It's for a multiplayer game, and my goal is to create a p2p-like connection but with the intermediary server I'll make sure it will always work, even in cases where the user has a firewall, or is behind a nat.
The server should hande several matches (pairs of clients), I'm writing it in python and it's a bit harder than what I thought.
Is there any open source code for a server similar to this?
Take a look at the ZeroMq (0MQ) framework as an alternative to creating your own messaging. There's a python binding (pyzmq) for it.
This details how to write a UDP server in Python.
I'm currently writing a project in Python which has a client and a server part. I have troubles with the network communication, so I need to explain some things...
The client mainly does operations the server tells him to and sends the results of the operations back to the server. I need a way to communicate bidirectional on a TCP socket.
Current Situation
I currently use a LineReceiver of the Twisted framework on the server side, and a plain Python socket (and ssl) on client side (because I was unable to correctly implement a Twisted PushProducer). There is a Queue on the client side which gets filled with data which should be sent to the server; a subprocess continuously pulls data from the queue and sends it to the server (see code below).
This scenario works well, if only the client pushes its results to the manager. There is no possibility the server can send data to the client. More accurate, there is no way for the client to receive data the server has sent.
The Problem
I need a way to send commands from the server to the client.
I thought about listening for incoming data in the client loop I use to send data from the queue:
def run(self):
while True:
data = self.queue.get()
logger.debug("Sending: %s", repr(data))
data = cPickle.dumps(data)
self.socket.write(data + "\r\n")
# Here would be a good place to listen on the socket
But there are several problems with this solution:
the SSLSocket.read() method is a blocking one
if there is no data in the queue, the client will never receive any data
Yes, I could use Queue.get_nowait() instead of Queue.get(), but all in all it's not a good solution, I think.
The Question
Is there a good way to achieve this requirements with Twisted? I really do not have that much skills on Twisted to find my way round in there. I don't even know if using the LineReceiver is a good idea for this kind of problem, because it cannot send any data, if it does not receive data from the client. There is only a lineReceived event.
Is Twisted (or more general any event driven framework) able to solve this problem? I don't even have real event on the communication side. If the server decides to send data, it should be able to send it; there should not be a need to wait for any event on the communication side, as possible.
"I don't even know if using the LineReceiver is a good idea for this kind of problem, because it cannot send any data, if it does not receive data from the client. There is only a lineReceived event."
You can send data using protocol.transport.write from anywhere, not just in lineReceived.
"I need a way to send commands from the server to the client."
Don't do this. It inverts the usual meaning of "client" and "server". Clients take the active role and send stuff or request stuff from the server.
Is Twisted (or more general any event driven framework) able to solve this problem?
It shouldn't. You're inverting the role of client and server.
If the server decides to send data, it should be able to send it;
False, actually.
The server is constrained to wait for clients to request data. That's generally the accepted meaning of "client" and "server".
"One to send commands to the client and one to transmit the results to the server. Does this solution sound more like a standard client-server communication for you?"
No.
If a client sent messages to a server and received responses from the server, it would meet more usual definitions.
Sometimes, this sort of thing is described as having "Agents" which are -- each -- a kind of server and a "Controller" which is a single client of all these servers.
The controller dispatches work to the agents. The agents are servers -- they listen on a port, accept work from the controller, and do work. Each Agent must do two concurrent things (usually via the select API):
Monitor a well-known socket on which it will receive work from the one-and-only client.
Do the work (in the background).
This is what Client-Server usually means.
If each Agent is a Server, you'll find lots of libraries will support this. This is the way everyone does it.