DirectPlay Simulator

Description

The DirectPlay Simulator tool provides a simulated environment for testing the robustness of network applications. It can simulate low-bandwidth or high-latency connections over a high-speed local area network and can generate random or programmed message transmission failures.

Path

Executable and DLL: (SDK root)\Samples\Multimedia\DPlay\Bin

DPSimcfg.exe is used to configure the tool. The functionality of the tool is in DPSim.dll, which must be copied to the Windows system directory.

User's Guide

DPSimcfg.exe is used to configure the registry parameters used by DirectPlay Simulator and to activate or deactivate it by adding or removing the service provider registry entry. When active, the simulator can be selected from the list of service providers. It is implemented over the TCP/IP service provider.

Click the arrow buttons to cycle through the following modes of operation:

• Drop no packets.
• Randomly drop n% of packets. Set the percentage with the slider bar.
• Drop 1 of every n packets. Set the value of n with the slider bar.
• Drop packets according to a pattern. In the text box, enter a series of numbers representing the number of packets passed, the number dropped, the number passed, and so on, with each number followed by a comma or space. The pattern will repeat itself when the end of the sequence is reached.

Packet dropping can be specified not to occur until a certain period (in milliseconds) after communication starts, and it can be specified to last for a certain period ( in milliseconds). These periods are defined by entering values in the Start After and Stop After text boxes. If Stop After is zero, packet dropping will continue indefinitely.

Select the Drop Guaranteed check box in order to have guaranteed messages dropped as well.

Select the Latency option button in order to introduce latency to both sent messages and received messages. Set the latency, in milliseconds, by using the slider bars. Each latency can also have a +/- variance range, evenly distributed.

Note  For fine adjustment of the slider controls, you can click on the slider controls and use the arrow keys to increase or decrease the value.

To choose a simulated bandwidth instead of latency, select the Bandwidth option button and enter a baud rate in the text boxes, or choose one by clicking on the arrow buttons.

Click Activate to make DirectPlay Simulator available as a service provider.