RE: "Mirrors list order is snafued" - What is the order supposed to be?

["Gary R. Van Sickle" <g dot r dot vansickle at worldnet dot att dot net>]

> David Starks-Browning wrote:
>
> >OK, good point.  As long as nothing *blocks* waiting for pings to
> >finish, I guess I don't care if setup pings.
> >
> That is indeed a *must*, as many router filter echo reply packets, so at
> least some server's reply would never be received, and moreover UDP
> packets may be lost with no problem (no automatic re-transmission at all).
>

Sheesh, either you guys need to start playing more online games, or I gotta
start playing fewer ;-).  The UI wouldn't be blocking waiting for pings to come
back; how the games do it is they actually ping a handful of servers all at once
(with a suitable timeout, eg 1-2 secs) and fill the moral equivalent of a list
box with the servers as they respond.  At any time you can either cancel, or
pick one that's shown up and go to town.  That's pretty much what I'm
envisioning for this UI, which again I think we should in any case be moving
towards "hiding" from the average and uninterested user behind an "advanced"
button or something, and doing an automated server-picking based on ping and
even-server-load-distribution considerations.

> Different problem: we need either raw sockets (bad, bad, bad) or the
> ICMP.dll, which is available also on Win9x if some releaseof IE is
> installed, AFAIR.

I have it on good authority that IE 4.0 or better is a stated prerequisite for
setup.

--
Gary R. Van Sickle
Brewer.  Patriot.