I am working on a client/server setup where data like:

230,343,3(\n)

This is the coordinates & state of a player in a multiplayer game.

It needs to be sent/received 60 or so times per second. I can get the data to transfer, but the client ends up getting it very slowly and just jerking around the screen.

I have this on the server:
myServer.write(x + "," + y + "," + currentState + "\n");

And the client chops it up with a StringTokenizer.

Whats the best way?

Cheers,
Dr.E

fry wrote on Oct 4^th, 2005, 11:17pm:


Do you mean send an array of bytes Does Processing have a method for converting an int to byte[] Otherwise the byte is not large enough to hold the coords, etc.

Dr.E

4 bytes make up an integer. I had to ask about this for my final project last year. I wanted to save bytes instead of String files to save space in recording data from an exhibit that was likely to run all day. K. Damkjer gave me some code that shunts stuff back and forth quite happily:
Code:

int dave = 10;
byte [] larry = {
  0,
  0,
  0,
  10
};
void setup(){
  noLoop();
}
void draw(){
  println (joinBytes(larry));
  byte [] tom = splitInteger(dave);
  for(int i = 0; i < tom.length; i++){
    println(tom[i]);
  }
}

byte [] splitInteger (int num){
  byte [] sendBack = {
    byte((num&0xFF000000)>>24),
    byte((num&0x00FF0000)>>16),
    byte((num&0x0000FF00)>>8),
    byte((num&0x000000FF)),
  };
  return sendBack;
}
int joinBytes (byte [] bytes){
  return (bytes[0] << 24) | (bytes[1] << 16) | (bytes[2] << 8) | bytes[3];
}