Warp Pipe Launches With Mario Kart Support

jkeyes writes "The Warp Pipe project for playing LAN GameCube games online has just released Beta 0.3 for Windows. This is the first release to support Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, contains significant optimization, and even has region-free play, so you can battle against gamers from Japan or Europe - the first Macintosh beta is planned for next week."

Warp Pipe GPL release...

[Anonymous Coward]

The last GPL'd release of Warp Pipe (including sources) is available here [sf.net] for download.

Re:Warp Pipe GPL release...

[Dave_B93]

That version is 2-3 weeks old and doens't work very well with MK:DD, also it isn't being maintained by anybody. (not to mention the fact that the source is still availible from sourceforge CVS for now which has a fatter pipe, or that they thought they'd gone closed source a few months ago, so having that code is kind of questionable)

There's already 2 projects working on GC tunelling warppipe [warppipe.com] and X-Link [xboxlink.co.uk], so I don't see how starting a new fork of warppipe off 3 week old code is going to help unless you're a lot better at network algorithms than I am, or you're just a roll-your-own kinda guy.

Personally I'm going to try Warppipe tonight, then keep playing it till X-Link Kai comes out and compare the 2. I don't feel like hacking together someone's old code in hopes of getting my own solution working... but then again, I'm just lazy ;-)

Re:This news

[Dave_B93]

Actually if you go to Wal*Mart Tomorrow, you can get one for $78

For more info, check out this blurb at GameSpy [gamespydaily.com]

or are you counting the cost of a broadband adapter ( approx $35US) in your total?

Re:for how long?

[zr-rifle]

possibily forever, since it does not infringe on the DMCA.

It makes no attempt in circumventing secuity protection mechanisms nor does it hack in anyway the machine itself.

What it does is route the packets to and from the internet, acting as a gateway (or better, router) from one machine to the other.

Basically, the gamecube thinks it's routing packets to a machine in it's own LAN, while actually it's routing packets to an ip thank to the the Warp Pipe software. Warp Pipe works like a simplified Gamespy Arcade allowing players to accept connections or connect to a specified ip, chat in a dedicated chatroom and forwards packets from and to all machines connected. You should check out Kaillera, a frontend for MAME and other emulators that allows people to play online with games that were developed way before the term "multiplayer" went mainstream, to get an idea of what this cool lil' piece o' software does.

I have some reserves on the quality of the online gameplay since these games weren't designed to played online. Differences in packet size and packet rate greatly affect gameplay in terms of ping and lag, and the values differ if you are playing on a lan or on the internet. Warp Pipe devs can't change these values, finetuned for LAN play, because they don't have access to the game source code. I guess they'd have to pry it from Mario's cold, dead hands. What they *can* do is work out a proxy that snips and trims packets on the fly, but that would require a massive work sniffing the game packets and a specifical implementation for each game.

Still, it's better than nothing. A big thumbs up to the dev team.