Program Architecture

Introduction

The goal of this part is to establish a clear separation of each part of the program, before any development is started.

Shared parts

Networking

The teamspeak protocol re-implements some features over udp :

• Acknowledges
• Packet order
• Keepalives

The network part should be able to manage this :
- When a packet is sent, wait for an ack.
- If we do not receive it, sent if again with the version field increased (every ~100ms).
- Manage packet checksums (create and verify).
- If we receive a packet, send an acknowledge.
- Send an acknowledge for each different versions of the same packet.
- If we receive a packet with version 7, then with version 3, only send an ack for version 7

An idea is to have each packet type in a .c/.h file, put in a directory depending if they are sent by the client or the server.

Each packet should have an encode and a decode function, that take care of endianness/structure padding.

Validation checks

• All packets need a valid public and private ID.
• Command packets have a checksum (f0)
• Command packets have an order (do not process packet 23 if you have not processed/received packet 22) (f0)
• Audio packets have order but it is not used (f3)
• Command packets have a version, used in acknowledges. (f0)

Server-only parts

Randomization

A special care has to be taken for players private ID generation.

Maybe openssl’s pseudo random number generator could guarantee nobody can discover or predict a player’s private ID.

Database

A database should be used to store information (accounts, channels, etc).

• SQLite
• MySql
• Use an abstraction layer (currently libdbi)

Web administration

To administer the server, a web administration module should be created.

• Webmin/… ?
• Independent (php, python, perl, ruby?) ?

Client-only parts

Audio playing/recording

Audio playing/recording can be managed in a cross platform way with the portaudio library.

The audio part is strongly linked to the Encoding/Decoding part.

Encoding/Decoding

Codecs used in Teamspeak all have an open source implementation (speex/celp/gsm).
There needs to be an abstraction layer to those.

Graphical User Interface

• QT
• GTK+
• Cocoa
• WxWidgets
• Tk just kidding