data structure for client list

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0 comments, last by hplus0603 10 years, 1 month ago

I have started an educational project to learn about networking. I built a small server using enet that receives UDP packets and replies to clients, next step is to actually have multiple connected clients. I dont plan to create my own WoW killer mmorpg, but I would like to learn the right way to do things. I was plannnig to use an std::map to eep the list of clients indexed by their ip address, but then I thought that it wouldnt be optimal when the server needs to find client neighbors to propagate changes (I think that kdtrees are the right data structure to optimize that). Then I thought that I should have an std::map indexed by IP and a kdtree with "visible" entities. And finally, I realized that using IPs mnaybe is not a wise way to index clients, because it would limit connections to one per IP. What is the correct approach to this problem?

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Typically, you keep several data structures with "clients" or "client entities" in them.
You'll want a hash table (typically unordered_map, not regular map) from source IP:port to client.
You'll also want a spatial index, as you say a kd tree or perhaps easier a loose quadtree.
You may also want various queues for notifications, periodic tasks, database checkpoints, etc.
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