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The GameKit in iPhone SDK 3.0 create a peer-to-peer bluetooth connection between two iPhones, using Server-client model. In the bluetooth spec, up to 7 clients can be connected to a server. But in GameKit document, there is no words for this issue. Does it means a GameKit server can connect more than 7 clients? If yes, does that mean some clients is in sleep mode?

Thanks!

Soloman
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I've been looking for a definitive answer for this for months. There isn't one as far as I can tell. I keep going back to Volcore's blogs on the "woe's of gamekit" where they detail getting up to 4 devices connected over Bluetooth with very unreliable results. All Apple's demos point to "two devices connected" to be the ideal GameKit situation. I eschewed BlueTooth in favor of Wifi in the game I am developing since I knew that I could definitely get more connected (I needed up to 6 players—wasn't convinced I could make it work with BlueTooth). I've found it to be no problem to get 3 devices and simulator talking to each other (though It's not a real-time game—it's turn based—so the data sends are small and infrequent). My guess is that GameKit over bluetooth would not support more than 7 clients.

typeoneerror
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  • I agree. from the documentation on bluetooth it seems that two devices is their recommendation. And I agree that wifi would probably make for a much easier implementation. @Soloman since there seems to be no documentation why not write up some code and just see how many connections you can get before it freaks out :) – gruntled Jun 14 '10 at 15:58
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I've been working on a little app to broadcast messages to multiple iPods. It seems rather unreliable to use bluetooth for any more than two clients (assuming you're setting up a client-server architecture). I'd recommend using cocoaasyncsocket for communicating with multiple clients. I think you'd need a router though.

cplusruss
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