[botman]

Agreed. It would be most efficient if you could have some sort of shared memory segment to send things back and forth between a game engine and an external application running on the same server. But since UT2k3/2k4 doesn't support this, that's not an option.

The other problem with a loopback IP stack is even it will have a limited Operating System buffer space. So if you send too much data, the sender will be forced to suspend until the receiver has emptied some data from the channel. I have no idea what the size of the buffer is for Windows or Linux OS, but I'm pretty sure that this buffer isn't dynamic. It should be easy enough to test by creating a simple IP application with a sender and receiver that opens a port and have the sender keep sending 1K blocks of random data, while the receiver just sleeps and never reads anything. If you have the sender keep spitting out some output every second or so, you'll probably see a point when the sender stops sending output (because it's suspended).

botman