Round four reached one step from the race: eggs delivered, both
members ACKed with complete meshes, one member entered LoadingMission.
Two failures remained, both now fixed.
One: Steam reports incoming callers under locally-allocated ALIAS
FakeIPs, not their global ones - the owner accepted both mesh legs
but its identity check compared the alias against the egg address and
never counted the connections (no Connected to GameMachineHost on the
owner). The peer table now carries each member SteamID (lobby go
roster gained a field) and Accept resolves the caller identity back
to the global FakeIP the egg promised.
Two: mission load stalls the game thread for 10-30s with nothing
pumping, and Steam default 10s connected-timeout sheared every
connection mid-load (end reason 4001, rx ages 11.5-20.5s - right at
load duration). Connected timeout is now 90s; TCP never timed out an
idle arcade link and races pump every frame once running.
Self-test still green (ping, survives listener close).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
RPL4LOBBY implements the multiplayer front door on ISteamMatchmaking.
The setup menu grows HOST STEAM RACE / JOIN STEAM RACE buttons when
the Steam wire is live; hosting creates a tagged public lobby, joining
finds one. Every member publishes FakeIP + fake ports + persona +
loadout as member data; the room screen lists members (host marked)
and gives the owner a launch button.
Launching writes a nonced go-roster into lobby data. Each pod
registers every peer with the Steam transport (two-port peer table:
engine console/game ports map to Steam fake ports on connect) and
enters the race: the owner through the hosted-race path - it builds
the multi-pilot egg from real personas and loadouts and its console
marshals everyone - and members as network pods that boot straight
into WaitingForEgg for the owner to feed over the wire.
The lobby outlives races: members loop back through WinMain into the
room (no local console needed - MissionCompleted is waived for member
races), and the owner returns to the room after its results screen.
Leaving the lobby clears the hosted-race priming.
Verified on this box: menu buttons appear under RP412STEAM=1, hosting
creates a lobby on the Steam backend, the room runs and leaves back to
the menu; single-player cycling and the LAN hosted race both still
pass. Full three-account mesh test is next, on real hardware.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Steamworks SDK 1.64 vendored at extern/steamworks_sdk_164 (headers +
win32 redistributables only; .gitignore trims the rest). Both projects
build with RP412_STEAM; activation stays behind the RP412STEAM=1
environment switch, so plain desktop runs never touch Steam.
L4STEAMTRANSPORT.cpp implements NetTransport on ISteamNetworkingSockets
with FakeIP: SteamNetTransport_Install brings up SteamAPI, relay
network access, and a two-port FakeIP identity (fake port 0 = console
channel, 1 = game mesh), then swaps the process wire; any failure logs
the reason and the game carries on over TCP. Addressing keeps the
engine untouched: all pods share the -net port convention, eggs carry
fakeip:engineport, and the transport alone translates engine ports to
Steam fake ports via the lobby-fed peer table (RegisterPeer). Connect
mirrors the TCP retry-while-refused loop; Receive normalizes message
lanes back into the stream semantics CheckBuffers expects.
Runtime verified on this box: RP412STEAM=1 under AppID 480 came up as
169.254.59.52 (fake ports 32256/32257); without Steam credentials it
falls back to TCP cleanly; default boot logs no Steam lines at all.
steam_api.dll ships in the dist.
Next: the lobby layer (ISteamMatchmaking member data -> RegisterPeer +
egg build + RPL4CONSOLE marshal), which needs a second account to test.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Steam-multiplayer prerequisite from the design doc: L4NET keeps
hosts, message queues, and the deterministic mesh ordering, while
connect/listen/accept/close, send/receive, startup/cleanup, the local
interface list, and ip[:port] parsing move behind NetTransport
(L4NETTRANSPORT.h). WinsockNetTransport carries the existing TCP
behavior over verbatim - including the connect retry-while-refused
loop the egg-ACK ordering relies on - and is the process default;
NetTransport_Set installs a replacement before the network manager
comes up.
L4STEAMTRANSPORT.h documents the ISteamNetworkingSockets mapping
per method (FakeIP keeps [pilots] entries as IPv4 strings) behind
RP412_STEAM until the Steamworks SDK lands.
Also fixed in passing: the ExclusiveBroadcast path sent
sizeof(network_packet) - four bytes of pointer - instead of the
message size, which would have sheared the stream framing had it
ever fired.
Verified: single-player race cycle (menu, race, results, menu, race)
green; -net 8000 boots, listens for a console through the transport,
and idles stable.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CydandClaude Fable 5