Communication Lines Explored

It occurs to me tonight that we have several forms of communication with our circle. We have zoom, second life, quake, quake fortress, fortress classic, team fortress 2, diablo 2r, and of course, email, letterbox and phone — along with a few other lines. I think we’re about to lose one or more of those through government takedown, business failure or old programs that no longer work, and we’d better be prepared for that — this is not the most stable administration we’ve ever endured.

Here’s how it looks from my high perch:

1. Zoom — safest of the bunch (for now)

Zoom is corporate, global, widely used by business, medical, legal, education, everybody.
Hardest for anyone to shut down without triggering panic.
Your circle is safest here.

2. Email — next safest

Email is too deeply woven into the infrastructure of the world.
BUT… filtering, throttling, and shadow-suppression?
Oh yeah, that’s already creeping in.
Full takedown? Unlikely. Quiet interference? Very possible.

3. Second Life — fragile

This one is the soft underbelly.
It’s niche, server-dependent, and extremely vulnerable to policy changes, corporate failure, political pressure, simple obsolescence or somebody pulled the plug.

If one channel is more likely to disappear first, my hit is that Second Life might die of old age.

4. Phone — depends on which kind

• Landlines are fading

• Cell is stable, BUT extremely monitorable

• Direct phone communications can be restricted regionally during “emergency” declarations

So what are the weak links?

Second Life, diablo iir and then cellphones in that order.

What do you keep as the fallback core?

Zoom + Email.
Those are the spine of our communication grid, but they are open to inspection and can be cancelled or shut down.

If things tighten?

We can slipstream into:

• Website posts (harder to kill than apps)

• Old-school printed dispatches (ironically the most resistant tech ever invented)

• USB “sneakernet” files if it gets really weird, but we’re not at the “really weird” stage just yet, and hopefully we’ll never have to actually take that option.

My hit overall:

We won’t lose everything. Not everything. Just a few of those lines of communication. We’ll lose a side channel, not the core. And we’re already positioned better than most communities because we’ve never been dependent on a single point of communication failure.

We have an internet connector in the Godd engine, but it runs into problems with something — servers, routers, I’m not sure what — we can look at that in a minute.

🌐 THE VIRTUAL WORLDS MOST LIKELY TO OUTLIVE A SHAKEUP

1. VRChat

Rock-solid user base, massive creator ecosystem, extremely unlikely to vanish.
Downside: chaotic, noisy, not ideal for serious group work unless you make private instances.

2. Roblox

It’s not just a kids’ platform — it’s practically an operating system now.
Huge longevity.
Downside: aesthetic is childish and scripting can be a chore.

3. Unity-based custom worlds (your own)

This is the gold standard for survival.
If you build it, nobody can turn off the lights except you.
Total sovereignty.

4. Unreal Engine private worlds

Overkill visually, but bulletproof from a survivability standpoint.

5. Old-school lightweight 3D platforms

These are cockroaches — the good kind. They survive everything.

• OpenSim

• OSgrid

• Minecraft Java servers

• Any simple voxel-based world

• The Godd Engine & Editor

Even if the publisher of the alternate world dies, the world keeps running — if you have the files. I have all the files for a number of created worlds, and the levels editors and the skills to use them to make more custom worlds.

✔ Zoom

Zoom is the corporate backbone now. It only goes away in a civilization-level failure — which, under this infantile administration could easily happen.

✔ The GODD Engine created worlds

Indestructible as long as you keep the server or peer-to-peer connection alive.
Totally sovereign. No gatekeeper. No hassles. No kidding.

✔ A lightweight 3D platform you can self-host

OpenSim/OSgrid would fit your vibe beautifully. You can run it on your own hardware.
Nobody can take it down.

✔ Discord voice/video

Boring but hard to kill. Totally serviceable. It just occurs to me — I have a full working quake environment and I’ve built many levels in that engine, and it has multiplayer functions.

Hundreds of my world levels have been downloaded and used by international players. Also there’s team fortress and team fortress classic and a few others. It’s not as bad as I figured at first glance.

🔥 WHY QUAKE IS BULLETPROOF

1. No corporation can shut it down.

It’s ours. We own it. It runs locally. If the outside world collapses, the game still runs on a LAN or Wi-Fi mesh.

2. The quake/Godd type of netcode is primitive, which is GOOD.

It doesn’t require:

• HTTPS

• tokens

• session cookies

• voice-over-IP services

• cloud servers

It’s straight-up:
UDP packets + direct sockets = immortality.

Modern routers can block, but only if you let them.
Put in one port rule and boom — eternal life.

3. Quake runs on ANY machine.

• old hardware

• new hardware

• Linux

• Windows

• even Raspberry Pi class machines

It doesn’t care about GPU, OS, or modern frameworks.

That’s rare and very useful for our purpose, which is simple communication, staying in touch with the rest of our worldwide community. As long as the pipeline works, that’s all we want.

4. Team Fortress (the original mod) works the same way

In other words: Our community could meet in a retro shooter world indefinitely.

No reliance on: Linden Lab, Meta, Roblox Corp, Valve, Unity, cloud servers, payment processorsm subscription models — just our engine, our levels, our rules.

🎮 THE QUAKE LINE IS IMMORTAL

Quake, Quake Fortress, Fortress Classic, Doom and our own Godd engine. All of those engines were born in the wild era of raw sockets, open ports, LAN play, and modders who didn’t accept “no” for an answer.

Those engines:

• don’t care about HTTPS

• don’t care about authentication tokens

• don’t need cloud infrastructure

• don’t need Steam

• don’t need centralized servers

• don’t need modern OS permissions

They run on direct IP + raw UDP which is the most survivable networking on the planet.

Even in a blackout, if you’ve got two laptops and a switch or even a crossover cable … your world keeps running.

🔧 I built hundreds of levels in all of those engines.

That means:

• I can create new worlds without relying on asset stores.

• I don’t have to depend on anyone else’s toolchains.

• Everything I need is local, stored, archived, and rewritable.

• We own the architecture and I’m very skilled at building worlds.

We’re not users. We’re world-smiths. — worlds made to order.

🧠 WE HELPED DEVELOP THESE EARLY ENGINES

That’s not trivia — that’s a huge indicator of our tech lineage. This means:

• Our GODD engine is Old School tech, and maybe has a chance today.

• Uses the same logic as Quake, Doom and other early games, so I’m told.

• same file formats or near-formats — I think.

• more or less the same map philosophy — that much I can say for certain.

• The exact same networking assumptions — again, I think this, might not be so.

• same “fail gracefully, run everywhere” design — it’s rugged and tough.

This is why our engine still runs decades later. It was built on a foundation that refuses to die.

🛡️ THIS IS THE PART MOST PEOPLE MISS

Our digital Godd world is not fragile. It’s post-apocalyptic compatible.

If the whole modern internet flipped upside down tomorrow, we could still:

Host, meet, teach, game, explore, communicate …inside spaces we fully control. Most people are trapped inside platforms owned by giants. We are emphatically not. We’ve never been.

⭐ BOTTOM LINE

We don’t just have backups —we have parallel universes ready to boot at a moment’s notice.

Zoom goes down? Jump into a Godd multiplayer game. Second Life disappears? Pop open the GODD engine. ISP throttles you? Yeah, but LAN still works. Government clamps down? Peer-to-peer still breathes.

Our circle is way, way beyond vulnerable. We’re sitting on decades of sovereign digital terrain, all handcrafted, all functional, all independent. If anything, we’re one of the last truly autonomous world-builders left. And frankly, it’s kind of beautiful.

Here are some ideas that might have a chance in this internet environment:

🟦 1. The IP address

That’s a public, routable IPv4 address, not a private LAN address.
That’s good — it means:

• our server can be reached from outside

• the ISP is giving us a real public IP (not CG-NAT)

• the GODD engine can theoretically host inbound connections

This is exactly what you want when hosting multiplayer, as I understand it. No red flags there as far as I can determine — you may find otherwise.

🔶 2. The port 

Now this actually helps explain things — I think.

The Port is in the “high ephemeral” range which means:

• routers usually don’t block it — or do they?

• Supposedly firewalls sometimes do unless it’s explicitly allowed.

• ISPs generally ignore it (neither banned nor approved) according to rumor.

• this is much safer than trying to use port 80 or 443 with raw data, so I’m told.

So, in considering: It’s a good port, but it STILL needs proper forwarding to function for multiplayer hosting. Without port forwarding, all inbound traffic dies at the router.

🟩 So does this help us diagnose?

Given our IP and port, here’s the most likely cause of connection failure:

Our router is not forwarding port 44961 to our host machine.

That would completely block incoming players.

We need something like:

External Port: xxxxxx
Internal Port: xxxxxx
Protocol: UDP (or TCP — depends on what GODD uses)
Internal IP: the LAN IP of the hosting PC

Once that rule exists, the GODD engine world should theoretically become reachable again.

🟧 Next likely issue: Windows firewall

Even if the router lets it in, Windows may still block it.

You need an inbound rule:

• Port xxxxxxx

• Allow

• For the GODD engine executable

🟥 Third possible issue: The router is double NATed

If you have:

See You At The Top!!!

gorby