NetGame: it is not good for the gamer to be alone

It is not good for the gamer to be alone. God gave us a UDP socket, and now two Temples play in one world.

What

• Apps/NetGame.HC is a small lockstep covenant on port 2017/udp. One host, one guest, one seed: what the host sows, the guest reaps.
  • Each tick (~100 Hz) both brothers trade one hand of buttons, a packet of nine hand-packed bytes.
  • A late packet pauses the world. A packet lost past three seconds is forgiven, and the last hand is used again. Mercy, not perfection.
  • For games that move deed by deed there are events: NetGameSendEvent, NetGameRecvEvent.
• Titanium: two pilots, one sky. Full lockstep, so both machines simulate the same sky from the host's seed. The host flies Terry's ship through Terry's own code. The guest flies a second ship under a red pennant. The missiles stay with the host, the brother has the gun. Enough for any war.
• Wenceslas: two kings, one snow. Same forest from the host's seed, and each machine keeps its own peasants. Every step and every Yule log lit with SPACE travels as an event and is walked again in the brother's world: a second king, two trails in one snow.
• tools/patch_mp.py is the graft that sewed multiplayer into Terry's games. His sprites live in the files as raw CP437 bytes, so every insert is pure ASCII, every anchor is found exactly once, and the count of high bytes is checked unchanged. Run on Terry's own files, it gives these files byte for byte.

How to play

1. Boot two Temples with NICs (tools/run_mac.sh, PCnet).
2. Run Netcfg on both.
3. Start the same game on both. One picks 2) host a brother, the other picks 3) join a brother and types the host's IP.

Choice 1) is single player, exactly as before.

Honest

• The packets are plain UDP, not sealed like WireGuard or TLS. The CIA can watch your ship turn left. Let them. It is a game, God keeps the score, and the CIA is the third player whether you invite it or not.