[responses embedded] Thomas Hruska wrote:
> You're right Kerry, there is no successor to DirectPlay. DP sort of > died a quick death - there were too many problems with it from what I > understand. You always have the option of rolling your own, but you > need to figure out what sort of data you are going to be sending and > receiving. That's pretty much what Microsoft is saying: "Do it with sockets." They're not committing to supporting DirectPlay on Vista, either. > Brett mentioned SDL - it does sugar-coat some of the more nasty aspects > of sockets, but from the link he provided, there isn't much substance > there. That is, you still are going to have a lot of work ahead of you. Yeah, I took a look at it. I'm pretty famliar with socket programming now (thanks to a boost from this list ^_^), so I would be likely to just use my own socket routines. > The first step is to determine how MUCH data you are going to be > shuttling across the network. Since you are on a LAN, UDP/IP could be > the way to go for unreliable data. A lot of games use two sockets: A > TCP/IP connection for guaranteed data transfers and a UDP/IP > connectionless interface for sending/receiving current game state > information. UDP/IP is unreliable and there is no way to tell if data > arrived at the destination. The downside to UDP/IP is a lot of > firewalls will block some types of UDP packets and troubleshooting > becomes difficult for the user. Ok, that's good to know. It's not an issue with the current project, but it looks like I'll need to write a networking library for our game engine now. More and more games are networked, and I only see that trend picking up speed. > If you've never done socket programming before, SDL may be a good > starting point to sugar-coat some of the more ugly aspects of using > sockets. Games are far trickier to program for networking than any > other application because users are much less forgiving when it comes to > things like lag. (BTW, I'm willing to test your games if you need a > remote user whom you can trust to not leak it - I'm a hardcore gamer and > will play just about anything - I downloaded the LEGO Star Wars demo > last night and will probably play it this weekend). Thanks for the offer. I may take you up on it later. The current project is a theme-park attraction, and requires all sorts of specialized hardware, and a minimum of two machines on the same sub-net. If you're willing to buy a 50" plasma monitor, a specialized video card that sends output to four 640 x 480 monitors, 3D audio cards, and a HAPP controller, I'll be glad to sign you up as a tester ;-) (Unpaid, of course) (And did I mention that the game is for 8- to 12-year-olds?) Cordially, Kerry Thompson To unsubscribe, send a blank message to <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/c-prog/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
