Make it easy for a server to encode a packet once and send it to multiple clients

[rom1504]

Basically use client.writeRaw + a convenient way to encode packets only once.

use case : https://github.com/PrismarineJS/flying-squid/blob/master/src/lib/plugins/world.js#L62

(@Karang idea)

would make server implementations faster

[Saiv46]

{} !== {}

Maybe there should be a way to make a cache for that things (WeakMap + Hash)

[rom1504]

Invalidating caches is hard. It's better to do this explicitly

[Karang]

Why doing complicated things where it just boils down to exposing 3 things:

• A method to serialize a packet and return a buffer
• the list of connected clients
• a way to send a raw packet
  Maybe a convenience method can be added to the server:

server.writeToClients = (clients, data) {
  const buf = server.serializer.createBuffer(data)
  clients.forEach(client => client.writeRaw(buf))
}

The problem with cache is that the buffers will tend to be very short lived. Take for instance a position update packet: it needs to be rebuilt very often and only sent at a point in time, to all players around. But once it is sent, there is no point in keeping it in memory.

The only exception I could think of would be the map_chunk packets, that are fairly large, not modified very often and need to be sent to every new player coming in the area. But I think if we want to do some chunk packet caching, it makes more sense to handle that one in prismarine-chunks