Sockets, port 843 and firewalls

Questions & Answers
1

Hello,

We are working on an online game that needs to access a http web service. Since the webplayer cannot work with standard HttpRequests, I have to use sockets. I’ve purchased uniweb to make things easier for me.

For sockets I need to serve a crossdomain policy file on port 843 on my server. The problem is that this port is blocked at my company.

I could ask the IT personel to open this port, but actually that only solves the problem for me, and not for all future players of my game that are behind a firewall which blocks port 843. Since this is a game intended to be played at schools, that would be almost all of my future players.

So what do I do? How to solve this problem? Using another port is not a solution, the same problem applies.

Thanks for any help.

2

Have the “service” appear on the site that hosts the .unity3d file. Then have your web server request the real data from the real web service and return that to the player. (Depending on your point of view, your web server is proxying requests for the webservice, or performing a man-in-the-middle-style attack.)

(As a complete aside, the problem that many schools have is that they implement group policy objects, and often this prevents activeX controls from being run from user accounts. The Unity plugin will also need to be installed by an admin into Program Files using the /AllUsers install flag.)