Seafaring Fibbage

edited November 2014 in JoCo Cruise
I don't know about the rest of you, but Fibbage is quickly becoming a favorite party game for my circle-of-friends. It's competing with (gasp!) CAH for playtime. Unfortunately, playing Fibbage aboard the ship presents some problems... but I am here to attempt to solve them!

I've gotten in contact with Jackbox Games and they sound willing. How do I get information about our custom seafaring intranet that Royal Caribbean gracefully allows us? For instance: can we use a DNS override to reroute console traffic to a custom IP? Or will we need a custom client build that knows to talk to our infrastructure? And are things easier if I get the game's server running on the same box as other things or would we want a separate box for Fibbage?

Yeah, questions...time I get to know some of you. :]

Comments

  • I'd try posting this question over on the Twitt-arrr thread if I were you. Those are the folks who will know about the shipboard connectivity.
  • The Artemis folks use what amounts to a LAN-party setup. With wires. I suppose one could set up something similar with your own WiFi, though range would of course be limited.
  • Does Fibbage require an Internet connection to play, either from the console or client phone/tablets?  In other words, if XboxLive or PSN is unavailable, will Fibbage still work?  If the answer is yes, then it should be relatively easy to get it to work on the boat.  If the answer is no, you are pretty much hooped.  :)

    If it does work without internet, then there are two options.  First is to use the ship's infrastructure and hope that the console and client network packets get correctly routed.  This is a bit of a coin toss really.  The second option is much more robust, and that is to bring your own wireless router.  The console plugs into the LAN side of the router, and then client phones/tablets would connect to your WiFi.  This will definitely work, assuming you have a decent, non-cloud configurable router.

    Since we can't really know if the UDP discovery packets will be routable on the ships network until we get on board, you are better off bringing your own router.
  • XboxLive/PSN is definitely an issue. I have to check whether Fibbage will run without a PSN connection. Unlike xbox, you don't have to route everything through Sony's servers.

    For clarity, Fibbage is composed of three parts (oversimplified):
    1) Console client - this drives the TV
    2) Mobile device - this is the player's controller. Every player needs their own internet device
    3) Webserver - this hosts the game, and gets connected against by both the console and the mobile devices.

    The mobile devices hit the webserver at fibbage.com and that handles that. I'm not sure yet how the console talks to the webserver, but I know it uses DNS resolution to discover the endpoint. Mobile devices don't talk directly to the console, they talk to the webserver.

    The easiest solution (from our perspective) is for Jackbox to get us a self-hosted version of the game, where the client and webserver sit on the same box with its own wireless network and drives the TV. Players then connect to that WiFi and use IP or DNS to hit that webserver. Everything is independent and doesn't rely on ship infrastructure. They may have a tradeshow version like this already, idk.

    The easiest solution (from their perspective) is to deliver us their webserver. We hook up the webserver at some IP and use DNS overrides in the ship's infrastructure to route fibbage.com (and the console endpoint) to said webserver. A lot of routing hackery and a server box connected to ship infrastructure.
  • I doubt we will be able to get the ship to alter existing DNS entries. It is one thing to add a new entry for our server, another thing to alter an existing entry for another company's assigned domain name. Doubly so, since fibbage is not something that needs to use the ship's infrastructure, unlike Twitarrr.

    The most sensible approach if they don't have a self hosted version is the self contained LAN. They deliver their web server, which we hook up to our own WiFi router. Console and clients hook up to that router, and the router is configured such that fibbage.com requests are given the local web server's IP. Some routers have this feature built in, such as DD-WRT routers.

    Obviously if they do have a self hosted version, that would be best.
  • edited November 2014
    We could probably run it on a random laptop (as opposed to THE laptop) on the same local LAN. That's how we made Artemis work, with a wired/wireless router that the main server and all the console laptops connected to.

    That also saves you from issues where the ship wi-fi gets crushed by all the monkeys in one place.
  • The setup for the Twittarrr server is a Linux guest running on a Windows Server 2012 R2 host. If the setup is the same as we got last time, we will have static addresses for both the host and server as well as entry into the ship's DNS. If, and it's a huge if, they could get us a custom build that could be pointed at our hostname, I'd be happy to set you up on our box. The laptop is a quad core with 24GB of RAM, and we never even came close to taxing it last year.

    That being said, having a separate laptop connected with a physical cable might be wise for infrastructure purposes. If you were planning to run this in the game room, the wifi was virtually always crushed down there.

    If you were planning to set it up elsewhere, running it on the Twittarrr server would save you a fair amount of infrastructure getting your network running. Whether or not that is offset by the amount of configuration needed to get it to run is another story. :)

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