[Bug 3921] New: ioquake3 should use Zeroconf (Avahi/Bonjour) to advertise and discover local game servers

[bugzilla-daemon at icculus.org]

http://bugzilla.icculus.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3921

           Summary: ioquake3 should use Zeroconf (Avahi/Bonjour) to
                    advertise and discover local game servers
           Product: Quake 3
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: enhancement
          Priority: P3
         Component: Misc
        AssignedTo: zakk at icculus.org
        ReportedBy: jeremy.visser at gmail.com
         QAContact: quake3-bugzilla at icculus.org


Zeroconf (powered by Avahi/Bonjour) is increasingly becoming the de facto
standard for network service publishing and discovery. With all major Linux
distributions shipping with Avahi, Mac OS X shipping with Bonjour since v10.3
(in 10.3 it was called Rendezvous), and Bonjour for Windows available, support
for Zeroconf is far and wide.

Because ioquake3 is moving to support more generic libraries, such as OpenAL,
SDL, etc., it would make sense to move to Avahi and Bonjour for local game
server discovery, rather than Quake 3's custom discovery.

Quake 3's custom discovery has a disadvantage in that it only works across the
current subnet. If the PC can send traffic to another subnet (via a router),
the user can directly connect to another game via the IP address, but it cannot
discover the game automatically.

However, if Avahi/Bonjour are configured to publish to a centralised DNS-SD
server, local game servers from other subnets can be discovered. (Not 100% if
Avahi has this implemented yet, but Bonjour should be able to do it.)

I am not sure about Bonjour, but Avahi is generally accessed via D-Bus.
Implementing Avahi would add a dependency on D-Bus, but D-Bus does not need to
be accessed directly -- Avahi provides a C API to wrap around the D-Bus
interface.


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